Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. These Abraham Maslow quotes will motivate you.
Best 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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” ~ 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
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“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ 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
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“We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves” ~ 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
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “People are not evil; they are schlemiels.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers…even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.” ~ Abraham Maslow Quotes
- “We do what we are and we are what we do.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capabilities.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ 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
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“Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” ~ 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
- “You must want to be first-class …meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. 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
- “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… We must find out what psychology might be if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic, and stingy preoccupations with human nature.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“Man has his future within him, dynamically alive at this present moment.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.” ~ 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
- “We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “Be independent of the good opinion of other people.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.” ~ 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
- “Whereas the average individuals “often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are,” self-actualizing individuals have “superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “(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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “We may define therapy as a search for value.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, Only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear.” ~ Abraham Maslow Quotes
- “What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness? How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is my responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers? What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“What one can be, one must be!” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “The search for safety takes its clearest form… in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis… to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “Human nature has been sold short…[humans have] a higher nature which…includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“The chicken came first – God would look silly sitting on an egg.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day towards self-actualization.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “Innocence can be redefined and called stupidity. Honesty can be called gullibility. Candor becomes lack of common sense. Interest in your work can be called cowardice. Generosity can be called soft-headedness, and observe: the former is disturbing.” ~ Abraham Maslow Quotes
- “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
- “If you love the truth, you’ll trust it – that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run.” ~ Abraham Maslow
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“Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that person can be.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “The human being is so constructed that he pressed toward fuller and fuller being.” ~ Abraham Maslow
- “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.” ~ Abraham Maslow
