What does ‘happy’ mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.
Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
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.
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.
If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.
A child wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.
Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction...
Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light.
If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
The theory of science which permits and encourages the exclusion of so much that is true and real and existent cannot be considered a comprehensive science.
The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.
To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
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.
Quitting smoking can be a very good test of one’s character. Pass the test and you will have accomplished so much more than just getting rid of one bad habit.
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.
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
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.
One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.