The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.
Boys will be boys as long as there are no girls in the picture.
We may define therapy as a search for value.
If you love the truth, you’ll trust it – that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run.
One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Be independent of the good opinion of other people.
The chicken came first – God would look silly sitting on an egg.
A stupid man behaves stupidly, not because he wants to, or tries to, or is motivated to, but simply because he is what he is.
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.
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.
The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.
We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.
Man is a perpetually wanting animal.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
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.