Abraham Maslow

"What is required is to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in mind without losing the ability to function."

"The opposite of a great truth is another great truth."

"Learning and growth are not something that can be completed and finished."

"Since my own youth I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he courts the favor and the assistance and the cooperation of the people."

"To the extent that people are healthy, they move toward actualizing their potential."

"The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side."

"It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fight the old, but to create the new."

"If you only have a choice between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before."

"I have discovered the secret. There is no secret. There is only hard work, discipline, and common sense."

"Accusation is not education. Blaming is not teaching."

"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting."

"The most important education man can receive is about the nature of life itself."

"You must give up the way it has always been done before you can learn a new way."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a shame and an outrage."

"I have come to think of the psyche of the average man as divided into components that are largely in conflict."

"True creativity comes from authenticity, not from conformity to what others expect of you."

"The degree to which people are mentally healthy is the degree to which they're able to create."

"Jealousy is just not being happy for someone else's happiness."

"One can have as profound a relationship to a piece of music or a work of art as to another human being."

"Growth forward is in spite of low estimates of oneself, not because of them."

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them."

"We are all, in a sense, desperately hungry for personal communication with one another."

"The quest for identity often takes place in a social vacuum."

"The possibility of human perfection can be the only worthwhile goal for us to pursue."

"To love is to experience growth."

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. The same need applies to any human being in any field."

"The pattern of the future is not yet written. We all participate in writing it by what we do now."

"Self-actualizing people are deeply ethical. They strongly prefer honesty and truth."

"The authoritarian person is still a child inside."

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