What does ‘happy’ mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.
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.
The job is, if we are willing to take it seriously, to help ourselves to be more perfectly what we are, to be more full, more actualizing, more realizing in fact, what we are in potentiality.
Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, Only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear.
Since my mother is the type that’s called schizophrenogenic in the literature-she’s the one who makes crazy people, crazy children-I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.
It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
Seeing is better than being blind, even when seeing hurts.
Knowledge and action are very closely bound together, all agree. I go much further, and am convinced that knowledge and action are frequently synonymous, even identical in the Socratic fashion. Where we know fully and completely, suitable action follows automatically and reflexly. Choices are then made without conflict and with full spontaneity.
Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture; the saint, the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic. About all we have left is the well-adjusted man without problems, a very pale and doubtful substitute.
If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.
What you don’t know has power over you; knowing it brings it under your control, and makes it subject to your choice. Ignorance makes real choice impossible.
I believe that another task which needs doing before we can have a good world is the development of a humanistic and transpersonal psychology of evil, one written out of compassion and love for human nature rather than out of disgust with it or out of hopelessness.
The person who hasn’t conquered, withstood and overcome continues to feel doubtful that he could. This is true not only for external dangers; it holds also for the ability to control and to delay one’s own impulses, and therefore to be unafraid of them.
In a word if you tell me you have a personality problem I am not certain until I know you better whether to say “Good!” or “I’m sorry.” It depends on the reasons. And these, it seems, may be good reasons, or they may be good reasons.
Orthodox science today attempts to be free not only of values but also of emotions. As youngsters would say, it tries to be “cool”.
Motivation theory is not synonymous with behavior theory. The motivations are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost always motivated, it is also almost always biologically, culturally and situationally determined as well.
To sum it up, from this point of view, the two religions of mankind tend to be the peakers and the non-peakers, that is to say, those who have private, personal, transcendent, core-religious experiences easily and often and who accept them and make use of them, and, on the other hand, those who have never had them or who repress or suppress them and who, therefore, cannot make use of them for their personal therapy, personal growth, or personal fulfillment.
Capacities clamor to be used, and cease to clamor only when they are well used.
What this means is that, e. g., a basically satisfied person no longer has the needs for esteem, love, safety, etc. The only sense in which he might be said to have them is in the almost metaphysical sense that a sated man has hunger, or a filled bottle has emptiness.
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.