Quotes by 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.

The greater our need for food or safety or affection or self-esteem, the more we will see and treat the items of reality, including ourselves and other people, in accordance with their respective abilities to facilitate or obstruct the satisfaction of that need. Laboring under the effects of deficiency motivation is like looking at the world through a clouded lens, and removing those effects is like replacing the clouded lens with a clear one. Self-actualizing persons' contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.

Practically every serious description of the "authentic person" extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what he has become, assumes a new relation to his society and indeed, to society in general. He not only transcends himself in various ways; he also transcends his/her own culture.

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.

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life...in one's own backyard.

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

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

I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

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.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?