Whereas the average individuals "often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are," self-actualizing individuals have "superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general."

We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.

We cannot study creativeness in an ultimate sense until we realize that practically all the definitions that we have been using of creativeness are essentially male or masculine definitions of male or masculine products. We've left out of consideration almost entirely the creativeness of women.

Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.

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.

The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.