Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by Abraham Maslow
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
We may define therapy as a search for value.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
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.
Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.
If I were a Negro, I'd be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I'd rather go down with my flag flying. If you're weak or crippled, or you can't speak out or fight back in some way, then people don't hesitate to treat you badly.
If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you're just one more deluded Pollyanna.
It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.
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.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.
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.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don't have to riot.
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side... It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.
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.
What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
I'm someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.
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.
With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It's made up of pioneers, the beginners. That's where the action is.
With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
You can see neurosis from below - as a sickness - as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
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.
Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.
We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization….It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.
When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and self-esteem.
The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.
Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force, even though a small one.
If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.
One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.
A person who makes full use of and exploits his talents, potentialities, and capacities. Such a person seems to be fulfilling himself and doing the best he is capable of doing. The self-actualized person must find in his life those qualities that make his living rich and rewarding. He must find meaningfulness, self-sufficiency, effortlessness, playfulness, richness, simplicity, completion, necessity, perfection, individuality, beauty, and truth.
A positive self image and healthy self esteem is based on approval, acceptance and recognition from others; but also upon actual accomplishments, achievements and success upon the realistic self confidence which ensues.
You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.
Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.
What one can be, one must be!
We can consider the process of healthy growth to be a never ending series of free choice situations, confronting each individual at every point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity.
We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.
We do what we are and we are what we do.
Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.
All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.
I can feel guilty about the past, Apprehensive about the future,but only in the present can I act.The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
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.
One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.
It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment... the values that self-actualizers appreciate include truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency.
One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
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