Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

— 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

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

— 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

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

— 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

It is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often.

— Abraham Maslow

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be... In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.

— Abraham Maslow

The higher people get, the more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.

— 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

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, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.

— Abraham Maslow

If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays. I can now add a slight variation on this; you cannot have a good society unless virtue pays. But here we get very close to the whole subject of metaneeds, and also of the ideal conditions where dichotomies are resolved and transcended.

— 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

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

— 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

Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.

— Abraham Maslow

The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy. The study of self-actualizing people must be the basis for a more universal science of psychology

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

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.

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small . . . orthodox scientist who won't recognize as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

— 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

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.

— Abraham Maslow

You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.

— Abraham Maslow

Since my mother is the type that's called schizophrenogenic in the literature—she's the one who makes crazy people, crazy children—I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

— 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

[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.

— 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

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

But 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