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.

Abraham Maslow

Categorized in : Success Self Creativity

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

fear motivational life

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

unhappy expectations inspirational

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

stress pain self-esteem

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

Abraham Maslow

encouragement spiritual life

A person who makes full use of and exploits his talents, potentialities, and capacities. Such a person seems to be fulfilling himself and doing the best he is capable of doing. The self-actualized person must find in his life those qualities that make his living rich and rewarding. He must find meaningfulness, self-sufficiency, effortlessness, playfulness, richness, simplicity, completion, necessity, perfection, individuality, beauty, and truth.

Abraham Maslow

simplicity perfection self

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

Abraham Maslow

life-is forever teacher

I can feel guilty about the past, Apprehensive about the future,but only in the present can I act.The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Abraham Maslow

leadership motivational life

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

Abraham Maslow

humorous wisdom education

A positive self image and healthy self esteem is based on approval, acceptance and recognition from others; but also upon actual accomplishments, achievements and success upon the realistic self confidence which ensues.

Abraham Maslow

self-confidence self-esteem acceptance

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization….It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.

Abraham Maslow

weed writing motivational

Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.

Abraham Maslow

undesirable good-and-bad grows

Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force, even though a small one.

Abraham Maslow

helpful hurt people

We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves

Abraham Maslow

crave becoming

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

Abraham Maslow

perspective awakening change

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

fate wonderful beautiful

There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

Abraham Maslow

selfish giving-up perfect

Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.

Abraham Maslow

safety risk choices

We do what we are and we are what we do.

Abraham Maslow

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

Abraham Maslow

peak-experiences possibility failing

The chicken came first - God would look silly sitting on an egg.

Abraham Maslow

humorous god silly