Abraham Maslow Quotes - Page 2

One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.

Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.

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.

We do what we are and we are what we do.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

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.

What one can be, one must be!

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.

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.

We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.

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.

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

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.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Man is a perpetually wanting animal.

No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.

In order for us to become truly happy, that which we can become, we must become.

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.