Perhaps best known for his hierarchy of needs, Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who influenced the branch of psychology through the founding of the school of thought called humanistic psychology.
His famous hierarchy of needs determines a theory of psychological health based on needs situated on a hierarchical level, according to priorities. This theory was extended by Maslow himself, and then came the concept of “self-actualization,” where he stated that the happiest people are those who not only fulfill their basic needs but also their psychological needs.
Maslow was a teacher and practitioner and researcher of psychology, and throughout his lifetime, he produced a number of landmark works in the domain of psychology, like Toward a Psychology of Being, and Motivation and Personality, among others.
These works contain a number of quotes that resonate in our lives and can be read individually out of their primary context and still create a deep impact. Continue reading below to know a few of those extraordinary quotes by the giant of human psychology.
Contents
Abraham Maslow quotes
- 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
- I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
Abraham Maslow
- You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.
Abraham Maslow
- 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
- What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow
- The key question isn’t, what fosters creativity? But it is, why isn’t everyone creative?
Abraham Maslow
- A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Abraham Maslow
- We may define therapy as a search for value.
Abraham Maslow
- 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
- The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
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.
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
- If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
- 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
- Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.
Abraham Maslow
- Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
Abraham Maslow
- False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.
Abraham Maslow
- Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.
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
- Be independent of the good opinion of other people.
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
- You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.
Abraham Maslow
- Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
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
- 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
- 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
- Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.
Abraham Maslow
- 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
- The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.
Abraham Maslow
- Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.
Abraham Maslow
- To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
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
- 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
- A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
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
- 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
- One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.
Abraham Maslow
Conclusion
After reading the quotes, which only keep getting more interesting, you might want to explore Maslow even more, and we sincerely hope our compilation has succeeded in doing so since Maslow deserves a lot of effort to be explored and, of course, a lot of academic attention which he is generally not accorded with. A pioneer and a stalwart of psychology, Abraham Maslow gained most of his reputation only after his contributions to human psychology after the Second World War.
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