We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.
I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.
No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
People are not evil; they are schlemiels.
What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?
The test of a man is: does he bear apples? Does he bear fruit?
Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience. At this level, I have called the person godlike because most gods have been considered to have no needs or wants, no deficiencies, nothing lacking, to be gratified in all things. The characteristics and especially actions of the “highest,” “best” gods have then been deduced as based upon not-wanting.
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.
