Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Well why not a technology of joy, of happiness?

(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.

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

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

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.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

If you love the truth, you'll trust it - that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run.

Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.

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.

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

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.

What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

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

Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don't have to riot.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

A first rate soup is better than a second rate painting.

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