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.
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.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.
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.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
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.
Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
We may define therapy as a search for value.
