A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
– 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.
– Abraham Maslow
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.
– Abraham Maslow
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
– 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
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
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
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.
– Abraham Maslow
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
– 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
The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessive to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.
– Abraham Maslow
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
– Abraham Maslow
The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within-and make the point: This can be done.
– Abraham Maslow
We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.
– Abraham Maslow
We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
– Abraham Maslow
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
– Abraham Maslow
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
– Abraham Maslow
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. [Some] choose to work as best they can with important problems rather than restricting themselves to doing only that which they can do elegantly with the techniques already available.”
– Abraham Maslow
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.