Abraham Maslow - Quotes from Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences

Some Maslow quotes from Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences

General Quotes:
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety

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

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Victory depends on whether or not a duelist has the courage to fight until the bitter end.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within-and make the point: This can be done.

The good society is one in which virtue pays.