Abraham Maslow Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
As one studies these preconditions, one becomes saddened by the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed, so that a fully-human person can seem like a miracle, so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring. And simultaneously one is heartened by the fact that self-actualizing persons do in fact exist, that they are therefore possible, that the gauntlet of dangers can be run, that the finish line can be crossed.

Abraham Maslow
I do not recall seeing in the literature with which I am familiar any paper that criticized another paper for being unimportant, trivial or inconsequential.

Abraham Maslow
Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.

Abraham Maslow
The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small... orthodox scientist who won't recognize as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
What kind of guilt comes from being true to yourself but not to others?. As we have seen, being true to yourself may at times intrinsically and necessarily be in conflict with being true to others.

Abraham Maslow
I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive.

Abraham Maslow
Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled?...a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?

Abraham Maslow
In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.

Abraham Maslow
I have discovered the missing link between the anthropoid apes and civilized men. It's us!

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

Abraham Maslow
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.

Abraham Maslow
What we call 'normal' in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don't even notice it ordinarily.

Abraham Maslow
The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.

Abraham Maslow
Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.

Abraham Maslow
A stupid man behaves stupidly, not because he wants to, or tries to, or is motivated to, but simply because he is what he is.

Abraham Maslow
The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love.

Abraham Maslow
We have got to abandon the sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

Abraham Maslow
The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

Abraham Maslow
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.

Abraham Maslow
The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.

Abraham Maslow
The more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.

Abraham Maslow