False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment , anger and hopelessness.

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

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.

The fact that people who create are good workers tends to be lost.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.

One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

What is life for? Life is for you.

The search for safety takes its clearest form... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.

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.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

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.

My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.

The desire to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving character, and are as much personality needs as the basic needs we have already discussed.

A positive self image and healthy self esteem is based on approval, acceptance and recognition from others; but also upon actual accomplishments, achievements and success upon the realistic self confidence which ensues.