Peak Experiences Quotes

“Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and “normal” people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls “peak experiences”); and examination of peak experiences has led Maslow to conclude that the evolutionary drive (which is so clear in art and philosophy) is as basic a part of human psychology as the Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to self-assertion.

— Colin Wilson, “‘Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time‘: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard” (1965)

(Wilson C. “Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard // Stanley C. (Ed.). Colin Wilson: Collected Essays on Philosophers. — Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 110–111.)”
― Colin Wilson, Comments on Boredom/Evolutionary Humanism and the New Psychology: two unpublished essays

“We cannot see how divine the hills and the mountains are, so we want an angel with wings on top of them.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“[Tennessee] William's writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime. (playing Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire)”
― Alec Baldwin, Nevertheless

“But there are times — my favorite climbs — when it doesn’t feel as if I’m climbing. Instead, the cliff or tree or wall seems to be lifting me, higher and higher.”
― David Kudler, Bright Eyes: A Kunoichi Tale

“Ever since the lovely earth removed her dress, let me reach out, touch, and caress her captivating breasts, I've had a love affair with mountain climbing and I'm enthralled by our frequent peak experiences.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones, Giants At Play: Finding Wisdom, Courage, And Acceptance To Encounter Your Destiny