Quote collection
153 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Whereas the average individuals "often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are," self-actualizing individuals have "superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.""
"(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy."
"The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy"
"Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth."
"We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general."
"The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short."
"Human nature has been sold short...[humans have] a higher nature which...includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well."
"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself."
"I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capabilities."
"The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within — and make the point: This can be done."
"What one can be, one must be!"
"What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion."
"The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself."
"When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth."
"What is life for? Life is for you."
"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."
"The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs."
"People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well."
"We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves"