Top 120 Abraham Maslow Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.”

— Abraham Maslow

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2. “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

Featured in: Fear Quotes

3. “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

4. “All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.”

— Abraham Maslow

5. “What one can be, one must be!”

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

7. “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

— Abraham Maslow

8. “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

9. “To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day towards self-actualisation.”

— Abraham Maslow

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10. “The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.”

— Abraham Maslow

11. “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”

— Abraham Maslow

12. “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion.”

— Abraham Maslow

13. “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

14. “Be independent of the good opinion of other people.”

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

16. “Every person is, in part, ‘his own project’ and makes himself.”

— Abraham Maslow

17. “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

— Abraham Maslow

18. “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”

— Abraham Maslow

19. “One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities.”

— Abraham Maslow

20. “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

21. “The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love.”

— Abraham Maslow

22. “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

23. “To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”

— Abraham Maslow

24. “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

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25. “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

26. “Quitting smoking can be a very good test of ones character. Pass the test and you will have accomplished so much more than just get rid of one bad habit.”

— Abraham Maslow

27. “The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.”

— Abraham Maslow

Featured in: Humility Quotes

28. “Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.”

— Abraham Maslow

29. “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

30. “We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.”

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Abraham Maslow

34. “Self-actualizing people must be what they can be.”

— Abraham Maslow

35. “False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.”

— Abraham Maslow

36. “A child wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.”

— Abraham Maslow

37. “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”

— Abraham Maslow

38. “We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves.”

— Abraham Maslow

39. “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.”

— Abraham Maslow

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Abraham Maslow

42. “It is vital that people “count their blessings:” to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss.”

— Abraham Maslow

43. “What is life for? Life is for you.”

— Abraham Maslow

44. “Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.”

— Abraham Maslow

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Abraham Maslow

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

— Abraham Maslow

48. “The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.”

— Abraham Maslow

49. “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

50. “Religion becomes a state of mind achievable in almost any activity of life, if this activity is raised to a suitable level of perfection.”

— Abraham Maslow