People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of using one's inherent abilities and capacities for personal health and fulfillment.
Abraham Maslow emphasizes that individuals must actively engage their inherent capabilities—whether it’s intelligence, vision, or the capacity to love—to achieve emotional and psychological well-being. He asserts that these capacities are not just traits but fundamental needs that, when fulfilled, contribute to a person's overall health. Neglecting to use our abilities can lead to stagnation and dissatisfaction, reinforcing the idea that our intrinsic values are deeply tied to how we express and utilize them in our lives.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-fulfillment and personal growth.
It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that person can be.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I resolved then that I would permit no man, no matter what his color, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy.
The ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.
Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.
A man's mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
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