Self-Actualization Quotes
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow
If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays.
Abraham Maslow
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.
Abraham Maslow
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
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
Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.
Abraham Maslow
The fact is that people are good if only their fundamental wishes are satisfied, their wish for affection and security.
Abraham Maslow
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
Abraham Maslow
Expression and communication in the peak – experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.
Abraham Maslow
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
Abraham Maslow
Be independent of the good opinion of other people.
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
You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.
Abraham Maslow
The key question isn’t, what fosters creativity? But it is, why isn’t everyone creative?
Abraham Maslow
Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy, and suffering.
Abraham Maslow
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act.
Abraham Maslow
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
Abraham Maslow
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow
All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.
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
Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
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
Abraham Maslow
The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.
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
False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.
Abraham Maslow
One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities.
Abraham Maslow
To objectify our subjective thought so as to be able to look at it and improve it toward perfection. To seek peak experiences.
Abraham Maslow
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
Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.
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
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
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
We may define therapy as a search for value.
Abraham Maslow
What does ‘happy’ mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.
Abraham Maslow
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… should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.
Abraham Maslow
The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
Abraham Maslow
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.
Abraham Maslow
I have come to think of this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution in the truest, oldest sense of the word; the sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx made revolutions… new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of.
Abraham Maslow
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.
Abraham Maslow
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.
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
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
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow
Growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification which we have become familiar and even bored.
Abraham Maslow
What other self-actualization quotes would you add to the list? Leave a comment!
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