Abraham Maslow Quotes

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

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

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

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

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

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not.

In either case the idea is quite staggering

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

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

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

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

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

One's only rival is one's own potentialities.

One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

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

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

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.

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

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

We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with.

We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.