Self Actualizing Quotes & Sayings

Shortsighted people make [experientialism and social reform] opposites, mutually exclusive. [...] The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person. — Abraham H. Maslow

Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy to project themselves as this or that, dedicating their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than actualizing their potentiality as a human being — Bruce Lee

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves.
This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image — Bruce Lee

As a counselor, I have spoken with many people who want to know their spiritual gifts. They come hoping for some sort of diagnostic test that will precisely locate them. My impression is that this perspective represents a breakdown in the church. It reflects a church where we are running around as self-actualizing individuals rather than uniting as a God-glorifying community. — Edward T. Welch

Self-actualizing people - highly functioning people who live at extraordinary levels of awareness - train their minds to focus on what they intend to create and what they intend to manifest, and they won't let anybody change their mind. — Wayne Dyer

What the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction ... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities. — Rollo May

The whole man was in all his judgments and activities, and a discriminating zest for life, for 'common life', informs every page he wrote. He saw education as actualizing the potentiality for the leisured activities of thought, art, literature and conversation. 'Grete clerk' as he was, he was never willfully esoteric: quotations and allusions rose unbidden to the surface of his full and fertile mind, but whether drawn from Tristram Shandy or James Thurber they elucidate not decorate. His works are all of a piece: a book in one genre will correct, illumine, or amplify what is latent in another. — Jocelyn Gibb

Self-actualizing people must be what they can be. — Abraham Maslow

The job is, if we are willing to take it seriously, to help ourselves to be more perfectly what we are, to be more full, more actualizing, more realizing in fact, what we are in potentiality. — Abraham Maslow

The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also are best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously. — Abraham H. Maslow

Self-responsibility is the core quality of the fully mature, fully functioning, self-actualizing individual. — Brian Tracy

I think the great livers, the people who are fully self-actualizing and alive, are the great givers. — Mark Victor Hansen

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. — Abraham Maslow

I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices. — Padgett Powell

Among the many values that art can offer, the subtlest one - and, perhaps, the most inspiring - is the sight of talent, talent as such, the spectacle of human ability actualizing its best potential. In the presence of a great achievement, you feel as if you were seeing two art works: one is the object before you, the other is the artist who made himself capable of creating it. — Ayn Rand

If people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we are predictably irrational - and we clearly are- why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent? — Daniel H. Pink

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single point of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time. — Olaf Stapledon

We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. — Herbert Otto Gille

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 — Abraham Maslow

Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment ... the values that self-actualizers appreciate include truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency. — Abraham Maslow

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. — Abraham Maslow

Life is about movement, expansion, growth, and actualizing potential. If you stay in a home, relationship, or job beyond the time it is healthy for you, the universe will prod you with thorns as if to say, "It's time to move to a broader domain." If you do not heed the message, the thorns will get sharper and at some point you will have no choice but to fly. When you do, you will understand why a once comfortable situation became uncomfortable. — Alan Cohen

No one can self-actualize without self-actualizing those around them. — Mark Victor Hansen

In trying to express only those aspects of ourselves that we believe will guarantee us the acceptance of others, we suppress some of our most valuable and interesting features and sentence ourselves to a life of reenacting the same outworn scripts. Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential. Once befriended, our shadow becomes a divine map that - when properly read and followed - reconnects us to the life we were meant to live and the people we were meant to be. — Debbie Ford

The creative process must be explored ... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. — Rollo May

Logotherapy ... considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts. — Viktor E. Frankl

My father has been to me a paragon of what actualizing philanthropic potential can be. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

As one studies these preconditions, one becomes saddened by the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed, so that a fully-human person can seem like a miracle, so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring. And simultaneously one is heartened by the fact that self-actualizing persons do in fact exist, that they are therefore possible, that the gauntlet of dangers can be run, that the finish line can be crossed. — Abraham Maslow

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. — Dogen

To quote Maslow again regarding his self-actualizing individuals: "One does not complain about water because it is wet, nor about rocks because they are hard ... As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature both in himself and in others." (4, p. 207) This acceptant attitude toward that which exists, I find developing in clients in therapy. — Carl R. Rogers

Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential. — Debbie Ford

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." — Abraham Maslow

He was persuaded of the reality and significance of human choice; he believed that experiential learning was a far more powerful approach to personal understanding and change than an endeavor resting upon intellectual understanding; he believed that individuals have within themselves an actualizing tendency, an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment. — Irvin D. Yalom

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. — Abraham Maslow

The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. — Rollo May