Abraham Maslow Quotes on Psychology and Self Actualization

Psychology Abraham Maslow Quotes

1. “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
2. “Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.” — Abraham Maslow
3. “The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” — Abraham Maslow
4. “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.” — Abraham Maslow
5. “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
6. “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
7. “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
8. “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
9. “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
10. “Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.” — Abraham Maslow
11. “Every person is, in part, ’his own project’ and makes himself.” — Abraham Maslow
12. “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
13. “The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.” — Abraham Maslow

 

Motivation Abraham Maslow Quotes

1. “We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves.” — Abraham Maslow
2. “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
3. “Be independent of the good opinion of other people.” — Abraham Maslow
4. “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
5. “One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.” — Abraham Maslow
6. “We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.” — Abraham Maslow
7. “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
8. “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
9. “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.” — Abraham Maslow
10. “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
11. “What one can be, one must be!” — Abraham Maslow
12. “We do what we are and we are what we do.” — Abraham Maslow
13. “The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.” — Abraham Maslow
14. “Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.” — Abraham Maslow

 

Abraham Maslow Quotes on Growth

1. “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
2. “Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” — Abraham Maslow
3. “You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow
4. “One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.” — Abraham Maslow
5. “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-actualisation.” — Abraham Maslow

 

Abraham Maslow Quotes on Self Actualization

1. “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
2. “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.” — Abraham Maslow
3. “It (self-actualization) 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
4. “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
5. “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
6. “In order for us to become truly happy, that which we can become, we must become.” — Abraham Maslow
7. “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.” — Abraham Maslow
8. “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
9. “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
10. “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.” — Abraham Maslow
11. “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
12. “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
13. “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
14. “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
15. “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion.” — Abraham Maslow
16. “My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing” — Abraham Maslow
17. “The job is, if we are willing to take it seriously, to help ourselves to be more perfectly what we are, to be more full, more actualizing, more realizing in fact, what we are in potentiality.” — Abraham Maslow
18. “Self-actualizing people must be what they can be.” — Abraham Maslow

 

Abraham Maslow Quotes on Education

1. “All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.” — Abraham Maslow
2. “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” — Abraham Maslow
3. “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
4. “One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.” — Abraham Maslow
5. “In the ideal college, intrinsic education would be available to anyone who wanted it...The college would be life-long, for learning can take place all through life.” — Abraham Maslow
6. “The peaker learns surely and certainly that life can be worthwhile, that it can be beautiful and valuable. There are ends in life, i.e., experiences which are so precious in themselves as to prove that not everything is a means to some end other than itself.” — Abraham Maslow

 

Abraham Maslow Quotes on Life

1. “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
2. “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.” — Abraham Maslow
3. “What is life for? Life is for you.” — Abraham Maslow
4. “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
5. “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
6. “(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
7. “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
8. “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
9. “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
10. “The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.” — Abraham Maslow