“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
Familiar Studies of Men and Books http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/fsomb10.txt (1882).
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Robert Louis Stevenson 118
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894Related quotes

As quoted in Human Development : A Science of Growth (1961) by Justin Pikunas, p. 311; this might be based on a translation or paraphrase by Viktor Frankl, to whom it is also sometimes attributed.
:In Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Book VIII, Chapter four) Goethe writes:
:“Wenn wir” sagtest Du, “die Menschen nur nehmen, wie sie sind, so machen wir sie schlechter; wenn wir sie behandeln als wären sie, was sie sein sollten, so bringen wir sie dahin, wohin sie zu bringen sind."
:Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, Verlag C. H. Beck München, Herausgegeben von Erich Trunz
: Variant translations:
:*Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
::* As quoted in My Country Vol. 2, No. 3 (September 1968) by Litchfield Historical Society, p. 23
:* "‘When we take people,’ thou wouldst say, ‘merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved.’"
::* This translation occurs in the Harvard Classics edition of Wilhem Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VIII, Chapter IV. Translation by Thomas Carlyle Bartelby Online Edition of 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'. http://www.bartleby.com/314/804.html
Disputed
Variant: We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Source: Leadership Is an Art
Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 93.
Context: A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

“That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”
Source: The Claw of the Conciliator

1920s, The Ego and the Id (1923)

The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture IV: The Future of England, section 151 (1866).