Abraham Maslow
Hierarchy of needs, self-actualization
Most quoted
"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 full psychological height."
— from Motivation and Personality, 1954
"Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment... the values that self-actualizers appreciate include truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency."
— from Motivation and Personality, 1954
"Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self-actualization and the love for the highest values."
— from Eupsychian Management
All quotes by Abraham Maslow (211)
The science of being must be based on the science of becoming.
The healthy man is not motivated by the need to fix something that is broken, but by the desire to bring something new into being.
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.
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, and even ecstasy.
The opposite of self-actualization is not sickness, but stagnation.
The need to know and the fear of knowing are the two great forces in education.
The good person is the person who is becoming more self-actualized, more fully human.
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.
The self-actualized person is able to see reality more clearly; they have an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality.
The human being is so constructed that he presses toward fuller and fuller being, and this means pressing toward what most people would call good values.
The only way out is through.
Contemporaries of Abraham Maslow
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Abraham Maslow (1908–1970).