- “When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and Self-esteem.”
- “Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.”
- “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
- “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
- “Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.”
- “Self-actualizing persons’ contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.”
- “Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience.”
- “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
- “I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.”
- “The person in Peak-experiences feels himself, more than other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and of his perceptions. He feels more like a prime-mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more “free-will” than at other times, master of his fate, an agent.”
- “Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.”
- “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.”
- “One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.”
- “The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.”
- “If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”
- “But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.”
- “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.”
- “Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.”
- “All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.”
- “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”
- “All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.”
- “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”
- “I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.”
- “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.”
- “We may define therapy as a search for value.”
- “Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.”
- “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”
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