“a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.”

“Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. ... What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

“The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting.”

“He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.”

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes--within the limits of endowment and environment--he has made out of himself.”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”