"Maslow's Vision of Human Nature" adapted from the Editor's Introduction to Toward a Psychology of Being"

“We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”

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

“Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs”

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

“It is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often.”

“The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.”