Abraham Maslow Quotes

You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.

All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.

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.

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.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

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.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

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.

The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.

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.

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.

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.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves

Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.

One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.

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.

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.

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.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

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.

What is life for? Life is for you.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people.