Actualization of self cannot be sought as a goal in its own right. . . Rather, it seems to be a by-product of active commitment of one’s talents to some cause, outside the self, such as the quest for beauty, truth, or justice.
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular, moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
William James