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.

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

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

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

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.

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

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

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.

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.

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.

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