If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
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.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
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 science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side... It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
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.
Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don't have to riot.
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.
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.
Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you're just one more deluded Pollyanna.
You can see neurosis from below - as a sickness - as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.
