Top 100 Abraham Maslow Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
Abraham Maslow
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love.
Abraham Maslow
#6. The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.
Abraham Maslow
#7. Religion becomes a state of mind achievable in almost any activity of life, if this activity is raised to a suitable level of perfection.
Abraham Maslow
#8. 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
#9. Man has his future within him, dynamically alive at this present moment.
Abraham Maslow
#10. Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don't have to riot.
Abraham Maslow
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks.
All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive.
Abraham Maslow
#14. Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
Abraham Maslow
#15. I have discovered the missing link between the anthropoid apes and civilized men. It's us!
Abraham Maslow
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. It is vital that people "count their blessings:" to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss.
Abraham Maslow
#20. I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Abraham Maslow
#21. Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.
Abraham Maslow
#22. It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.
Abraham Maslow
#23. Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.
Abraham Maslow
#24. We cannot study creativeness in an ultimate sense until we realize that practically all the definitions that we have been using of creativeness are essentially male or masculine definitions of male or masculine products. We've left out of consideration almost entirely the creativeness of women.
Abraham Maslow
#25. A child wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.
Abraham Maslow
#26. The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.
Abraham Maslow
#27. We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.
Abraham Maslow
#29. In order for us to become truly happy, that which we can become, we must become.
Abraham Maslow
#30. 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
#31. Boys will be boys as long as there are no girls in the picture.
Abraham Maslow
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.
Abraham Maslow
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.
Abraham Maslow
#42. 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
#43. We are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated.
Abraham Maslow
#44. Apparently one impression we are making ... is that creativeness consists of lightning striking you on the head in one great glorious moment.
Abraham Maslow
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.
Abraham Maslow
#49. We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
Abraham Maslow
#50. The fact that people who create are good workers tends to be lost.
Abraham Maslow
#51. 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
#52. What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.
Abraham Maslow
#53. The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.
Abraham Maslow
#54. I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.
Abraham Maslow
#55. An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle and vanished.
Abraham Maslow
#56. Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.
Abraham Maslow
#57. Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.
Abraham Maslow
#58. Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction ...
Abraham Maslow
#59. The theory of science which permits and encourages the exclusion of so much that is true and real and existent cannot be considered a comprehensive science.
Abraham Maslow
#60. 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
#61. Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
Abraham Maslow
#62. A van backed through my windscreen into my wife's face.
Abraham Maslow
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
Abraham Maslow
#67. The test of a man is: does he bear apples? Does he bear fruit?
Abraham Maslow
#68. 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
#69. I'm someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.
Abraham Maslow
#70. To the extent that language forces experiences into categories it is a screen between reality and the human being. In a word, we pay for its benefits ... Therefore, while using language, as we must of necessity, we should be aware of its shortcomings.
Abraham Maslow
#71. 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.
Abraham Maslow
#73. The human being is so constructed that he pressed toward fuller and fuller being.
Abraham Maslow
#74. With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham Maslow
#75. We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.
Abraham Maslow
#76. If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.
Abraham Maslow
#77. 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
#78. When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth.
Abraham Maslow
#79. 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
#81. With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It's made up of pioneers, the beginners. That's where the action is.
Abraham Maslow
#82. 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
#83. Creative people are all there, totally immersed, fascinated and absorbed in the present, in the current situation, in the here-now, with the matter-in-hand.
Abraham Maslow
#84. Quitting smoking can be a very good test of ones character. Pass the test and you will have accomplished so much more than just get rid of one bad habit
Abraham Maslow
#85. There is, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Secondly, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige
Abraham Maslow
#86. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.
Abraham Maslow
#87. The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to
an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.
Abraham Maslow
#88. Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? ... a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?
Abraham Maslow
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow
#92. Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.
Abraham Maslow
#93. Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.
Abraham Maslow
#94. What does 'happy' mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.
Abraham Maslow
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. We have got to abandon the sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.
Abraham Maslow
#99. A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Abraham Maslow
#100. 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
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