Abraham Maslow - Motivation and Personality (1954)

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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
Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.

Abraham Maslow
Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.

Abraham Maslow
If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new centre. Now the person will feel keenl

Abraham Maslow
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy. The study of self-actualizing people must be the basis for a more universal science of psychology

Abraham Maslow
For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone. It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true, but their generality can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society.

Abraham Maslow
Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light

Abraham Maslow
One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

Abraham Maslow
Life could be vastly improved if we could count our blessings as self-actualizing people can and do, and if we could retain their constant sense of good fortune and gratitude for it.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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