Abraham Maslow
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.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Order
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.Collection: World
No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.Collection: Self Esteem
Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.Collection: Projects
We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.Collection: Work
Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.Collection: Communication
What one can be, one must be!Collection: Inspirational
Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.Collection: Block
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.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Spiritual
What is life for? Life is for you.Collection: Healing
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.Collection: Maturity
People are not evil; they are schlemiels.Collection: People
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.Collection: Giving Up
One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Stupid
The chicken came first - God would look silly sitting on an egg.Collection: God
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.Collection: Sick
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.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Views
It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.Collection: Achievement
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mean
Self-actualized people...live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.Collection: Real
We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.Collection: Perfect
You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.Collection: Class
Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.Collection: Character
Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing.Collection: Teaching
In order for us to become truly happy, that which we can become, we must become.Collection: Order
The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.Collection: Loss
Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.Collection: Laughing
One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.Collection: Safety
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... We must find out what psychology might be if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic and stingy preoccupations with human nature.Collection: Successful
People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.Collection: Eye
(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.Collection: Thanksgiving
Man has his future within him, dynamically alive at this present moment.Collection: Inspirational Life
Man is a perpetually wanting animal.Collection: Animal
Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.Collection: Children
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 keenlCollection: Reality
When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Average
We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.Collection: Remember
Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, Only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear.Collection: Confidence
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.Collection: Guilt
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.Collection: Taken
What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness? How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is my responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers? What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?Collection: Meaningful
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.Collection: Mean
The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within — and make the point: This can be done.Collection: Voice