Abraham Maslow Quotes
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.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
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.
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.
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.
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.
The most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.
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.
We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.
Self-actualized people...live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.
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.
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.
(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth.
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.
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'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.
We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.
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.
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.
No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.
