45+ Best Abraham Maslow Quotes About Life And Success

Abraham Harold Maslow is an American psychologist and motivational speaker.

He is known for his motivational theory in psychology, called Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which divides the human's needs into five stages: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. These are the major component of mental wellness.

According to Abraham Maslow quotes, there is no greater joy in life than fulfilling these innate human needs. This method can be used to explain difficult behavior patterns.

Some of the best known Abraham Maslow quotes about self-actualization includes, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Has that got you thinking?

According to Abraham Maslow quotes, when you accept your worth, everything you are capable of becoming can be achieved. When a person realizes the purposes of life and their dreams, they change as a person, they change their awareness, functioning, and they see many more possibilities.

So why not challenge your world view with this list of the best Abraham Maslow quotes? These Abraham Maslow quotes cover a range of topics, from motivation to self-esteem, so its time to get thinking!

If you like these Abraham Maslow quotes and are looking for more psychologist quotes, check out these Sigmund Freud quotes and Jean Piaget quotes too.

The Best Abraham Maslow Quotes

Here we have listed some of the best Abraham Maslow quotes from the famous psychologist, which can change your views about psychology and the human mind. He uses simple terms to explain how human nature works, and he guides people to understand that motivation and personality are two different aspects of the same person.

In one of the famous Abraham Maslow quotes, he said, "One's only rival is one's potentialities.

One's only failure is failing to live up to one's possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king."

Does that make you think?

According to Maslow, a positive self-image and healthy self-esteem are based on approval, acceptance, and recognition of one's own personality, and acceptance of one's self-worth and human nature.

So, if you are looking for hierarchy of needs quotes, personality quotes, motivation quotes, or psychology quotes, then keep on reading as these Abraham Maslow quotes all about motivation and personality can help you become a better person.

1. “If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays.”

- Abraham Maslow.

2. "What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization."

- Abraham Maslow.

3. "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.

4. "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.

5. “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.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

7. "Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.”

– Abraham Maslow.

8. “The fact is that people are good if only their fundamental wishes are satisfied, their wish for affection and security.”

- Abraham Maslow.

9. “Expression and communication in the peak – experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.”

– Abraham Maslow.

10. “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.

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

– Abraham Maslow.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

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

– Abraham Maslow.

15. "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.

16. "You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety."

-Abraham Maslow.

17. "The key question isn’t, what fosters creativity? But it is, why isn’t everyone creative?”

- Abraham Maslow.

18. "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.

19. "Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy, and suffering."

—Abraham Maslow.

20. “I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act.”

- Abraham Maslow.

Abraham Maslow Quotes About Growth And Life

As an expert on the life and human experience, Abraham Maslow very beautifully said, “The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder...”.

He also very aptly said, “We need not take refuge in supernatural Gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.” These quotes show his approach, as a psychologist, to thinking about wider themes of human life.

So, if you are looking for self-actualization quotes, physiological quotes, or humanistic psychology quotes by Abraham Maslow, then keep on reading.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

23. "We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings."

- Abraham Maslow.

24. “Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.”

― Abraham Maslow.

25. “The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.”

- Abraham Maslow.

26. “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.

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

― Abraham Maslow.

28. “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.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

30. "The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important."

― Abraham Maslow.

31. “One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.”

- Abraham Maslow.

32. "To objectify our subjective thought so as to be able to look at it and improve it toward perfection. To seek peak experiences."

- Abraham Maslow.

33. "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.

34. “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.”

- Abraham Maslow.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

36. “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.

37. "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.

38. "We may define therapy as a search for value."

- Abraham Maslow.

39. “What does 'happy' mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.”

- Abraham Maslow.

40. "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... should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit."

- Abraham Maslow.

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

- Abraham Maslow.

42. “I have come to think of this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution in the truest, oldest sense of the word; the sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx made revolutions... new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of.”

- Abraham Maslow.

43. "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.

44. "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.

45. “If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.”

― Abraham Maslow.

46. “The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.”

― Abraham Maslow.

47. “In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.”

― Abraham Maslow.

48. “Growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification which we have become familiar and even bored.”

― Abraham Maslow.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for 35+ of the best Abraham Maslow quotes about life and success from the famous psychologist, then why not take a look at these Oedipus quotes, or sociology quotes for more?