I'm someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
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 you deliberately set out to be less than you are capable, you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
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.
Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.
What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
A first rate soup is better than a second rate painting.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
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.
You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.
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.
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.
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
The key question isn't “What fosters creativity?But it is why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled?
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.
We may define therapy as a search for value.
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.
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
Almost all creativity requires purposeful play.
With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
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.
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest one). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.
If I were a Negro, I'd be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I'd rather go down with my flag flying. If you're weak or crippled, or you can't speak out or fight back in some way, then people don't hesitate to treat you badly.
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.
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.
Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.
With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It's made up of pioneers, the beginners. That's where the action is.
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.
It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.
To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit every problem looks like a nail.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
