39 Abraham Maslow Quotes

Abraham Maslow quotes

1. 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.

2. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

3. Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.

4. The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

5. Victory depends on whether or not a duelist has the courage to fight until the bitter end.

6. What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

7. If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

8. The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within-and make the point: This can be done.

9. The good society is one in which virtue pays.

10. What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

11. Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

12. You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety

13. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

1. We are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated.

2. The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

3. Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

4. It is unfortunate to consider all lawyers as natural Satanists many are just dumb.

5. Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

6. Well why not a technology of joy, of happiness?

7. We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.

8. If you love the truth, you'll trust it - that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run.

9. We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

10. Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

11. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

12. Plateau experiencing can be achieved, learned, earned by long hard work… A transient glimpse is certainly possible in the peak experiences which may, after all, come sometimes to anyone. But, so to speak, to take up residence on the high plateau … that is another matter altogether. That tends to be a lifelong effort.

13. You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.

14. If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.

15. It is vital that people "count their blessings:" to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss.

16. Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

17. There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

18. 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.

19. To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.

20. Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.

21. When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth.

22. We do what we are and we are what we do…

23. All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

24. What does 'happy' mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.

25. A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

26. We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.