Life could be vastly improved if we could count our blessings as self-actualizing people can and do, and if we could retain their constant sense of good fortune and gratitude for it.

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

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

Self-actualizing people must be what they can be.

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... We must find out what psychology might be if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic and stingy preoccupations with human nature.

You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. 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.

Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.