What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. Read Summary
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves. Read Summary
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person. Read Summary
Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical. Read Summary
Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. Read Summary
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization. Read Summary
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary
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. Read Summary