Oh most holy angel of God, appointed by God to be my guardian, I give you thanks for all the benefits which you have ever bestowed on me in body and in soul. I praise and glorify you that you condescended to assist me with such patient fidelity, and to defend me against all the assaults of my enemies.

Blessed be the hour in which you were assigned me for my guardian, my defender and my patron. In acknowledgement and return for all your loving ministries to me, I offer you the infinitely precious and noble heart, and firmly purpose to obey you henceforward, and most faithfully to serve my God.

Heaven, at a distance, does not attract us so forcibly as a fool’s paradise in sight. I am dying in Paradise, long are the times of Heaven. All sinners would be miserable in Heaven. Every human act, good or ill, is an angel to guide or to warn. There is a way to hell, even from the gates of Heaven.

I do not know what heart means. I sometimes fancy that it is a talent for getting into debt, and running away with other men’s wives. Who know what the justice of Heaven may inflict in order to convince us that we are not out of the reach of misfortune; and to reduce us to a better reliance, than that we have hitherto presumptuously made?

History, like love, is apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness. Not a day passes over the Earth, but men and women, of note, do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. One who is too proud ever to admit a mean thought, who is ambitious only of ideal excellence, who has an inflexible will only in the pursuit of truth and righteousness, may be a saint and a hero.

Honesty is the best policy, I always find it so. I lost forty seven pound ten by being honest this morning. However, it is all gain, it is gain! A man who loses forty seven pound ten, in one morning, by his honesty, is a man to be envied. If it had been eighty pound, the luxuriousness of feeling would have been increased. Every pound lost would have been a hundredweight of happiness gained.

You had better be an honest person than half a rogue. One that loseth their honesty hath nothing else to lose. One remedy for mistakes is honesty. By this I know that you delight in me: my enemy will not shout in triumph over me. However, you have upheld me because of my integrity, and set me in your presence forever. Blessed be the LORD, our father in Heaven, from everlasting to everlasting.

So you walk in the way of the good and keep to the paths of the righteous. For the upright will inhabit the land, and those with integrity will remain in it, and I will sing of steadfast love and justice; to you, Oh Lord, I will make music. I will ponder the way that is blameless. Oh when you come to me? Will walk with integrity of heart within my house because whoever walks in in integrity will be delivered, but he or she who is crooked in their ways will suddenly fail.

Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God help thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

We are all in the hands of the Gods. Oh God! That man should be a thing for immortal should to sieve through. It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. However, the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.

The human mind is easily induced to forget those benefits with which we are constantly surrounded, and our possession of which we regard as secure.  Human behavior is governed by a large number of types and motives, some that are physiological, but many more that are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experiences, and growth experiences.

In the healthy person, adulthood is characterized by a variety of new challenges. If one’s sense of self hood is sufficiently developed in adolescence, a young adult will seek to expand that sense of self and awareness, to actualize one’s potential for growth and creativity. Actualize may be a new word to you, and it means to make real, to make actual those characteristics or talents that are present, but not yet developed in an individual (such qualities are sometimes called latent).

In self-actualization, the newly formed self is motivated to try out new experiences to see what it can do. Most of the time, our decisions are not clear cut one, in which one choice is obviously best. An individual in a particular situation may feel trapped in the middle, pulled in two different directions. A self-actualizing person takes all the alternatives into account.

Conversely, a person with a lot of pride, pomp, and circumstance may have a huge ego, so huge that they even think they are God. This type of person is called a megalomaniac because they are not fulfilled. Megalomaniacs spend most of their time searching for identity, praise, or approval.

Or perhaps their safety needs are so great that one never tries anything new, challenging, or exciting, because he or she is afraid to do so. People on the lower level of humanity just care about sex, food, and gratification because they are operating from deficiency motivation. They are so strongly motivated to fill in the holes, plug in the gaps, that very little time or energy is left over to meet other, more advanced needs.

People who proclaim that they are God are stuck at a low level of the evolutionary scale. In contrast, a starving person is unlikely to be a self-actualizer, unless he is a mystic giving up food and water voluntarily to concentrate on things that are more important than his own mind or well-being.  And in that case, he must find ways to more or less disconnect his physiological motivations.

A self-actualizers, in comparison, will ordinarily have been given enough support and love by his parents, while he was young, so that he is secure, not afraid to try new things. He will have developed a strong sense of autonomy, and will feel secure enough about his own personality, strengths, weaknesses, and uniqueness, to expand his horizons.

In other words, a self-actualizer, will not be burdened by the deficiency motivation we discussed earlier.  Does this mean that every self-actualizing person must have had a perfect childhood? No, not at all, but he must have found new ways to overcome deficiencies so that they do not prevent him from concentrating on expanding his abilities, enjoying his life, not always hung up at some lower level. How? Perhaps through therapy, perhaps through religion, and maybe through association with other people.

What motivates a self-actualizing person? Start by saying what does not control his behavior. Usually, he is not governed by tradition or by other people’s wishes. This is not to say that he scorns tradition and care nothing about other people’s needs. It is to say that he is not controlled by these things, when he wants to do something different.

The mistake most people make is to think that the self-actualized person is a superhuman person with no weaknesses. The truth is that he very often is silly, wasteful, or thoughtless, and can be thoroughly stubborn or irritating. What I want to make clear is that the self-actualized  person is an exciting person and not stuffed shirt or joyless person, as many might want to make him.

His virtues are extraordinary, but his faults are also very much present. So as one becomes his actualizing potentials, it is important not to seek perfection, but to discover the joy that comes from integration of both strength and weaknesses, to freely skate between all potentials. He knows that there is more to life, does not have a sex life, is very clean, single, honest, and accepts responsibility.

A self-actualizer tends to be impatient with trivial and nonsensical rules. He will be bound by a rule if it makes sense to him. He seeks novelty, stimulation, challenge, rather than safety. In his job, he will not be so much tempted by a larger salary as by a chance to do something well, to experiment.

As the self-actualizer gets older, he tends to be more and more interested in cognitive (thinking and learning) and esthetic (art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy) activities.

Most self-actualizers do not tend to be highly competitive. Does that seem like a contradiction for such a competent individual? Think of people you have probably known, who are sufficiently self-confident and talented, that they do not need to compare themselves with anyone else. If you are secure enough in knowing what you want out of life, you do not have to use anyone else’s standards. Meeting your own standards is what counts. (This is called being-motivation or growth-motivation, in contract to deficiency-motivation.”

The self-actualizing person is comfortable with other people, probably in part because he feels no need to compete with or judge them and is not worried about their competing with or judging him. He realizes that human beings come in all varieties, some cruel, hostile, selfish; some victims, sufferers, or outcast; and still others loving, cooperative, able to share a larger vision. The self-actualizer knows that each of these qualities is present, to some degree, in all of us. And he tries to help as many people as possible to maximize their own potential for full living.

None of this meant to imply that the self-actualizer is perfect or that he exhibits all these good qualities all the time, he is just as human being, though he can hardly be called ordinary. He is a person who, because of his own inner motivations, has been able to use more of his ability and intelligence than most of us, because in the main, he is not controlled by his own lower needs or by other people.

The special private happiness of the free person comes, I think, from his finding ways that help him be present in what he is doing. When I feel most pressured, most unfree, it is usually because I am not there as me. I do not mean that I am not in what I am doing, necessarily, I mean that I am driving myself, treating myself as an object, a tool, an instrument. No man is born into the World without his particular allotment.