Top 10 Abraham Maslow Quotes

Abraham Maslow
(Psychologist)

Abraham Harold Maslow  was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Alliant International University, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms." A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children and was classed as "mentally unstable" by a psychologist. His parents were first generation Jewish immigrants from Russia from Kiev who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century. They had decided to live in New York City and in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood. His parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education. It was a tough time for Maslow, as he experienced anti-Semitism from his teachers and from other children around the neighborhood. He had various encounters with anti-Semitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him. Maslow and other young people at the time with his background were struggling to overcome such acts of racism and ethnic prejudice in the attempt to establish an idealistic world based on widespread education and monetary justice. The tension outside his home was also felt within it, he rarely got along with his mother, and eventually developed a strong revulsion to her. He is quoted as saying, "What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world – even her own husband and children – her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness..." He also grew up with few friends other than his cousin Will, and as a result "...[He] grew up in libraries and among books." It was here that he developed his love for reading and learning. He went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn. Here, he served as the officer to many academic clubs, and became editor of the Latin Magazine. He also edited Principia, the school's Physics paper, for a year. He developed other strengths as well:

Top 10 Abraham Maslow Quotes

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.

He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.

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.

The fact that people who create are good workers tends to be lost.

The job is, if we are willing to take it seriously, to help ourselves to be more perfectly what we are, to be more full, more actualizing, more realizing in fact, what we are in potentiality.

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, i.e. new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of

Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, Only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear.

I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive.

If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.

I have discovered the missing link between the anthropoid apes and civilized men. It's us! 

He continued his research at Columbia University, on similar themes. There he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College. His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and though he did not completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind. He called his new discipline humanistic psychology. Maslow was already a 33-year-old father and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He was thus ineligible for the military. However, the horrors of war instead inspired a vision of peace in him and this led to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self-actualizing people. These studies began with his two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. These two were so accomplished in both realms, and such "wonderful human beings" as well, that Maslow began taking notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential. He wrote extensively on the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists but adding significantly to them, especially the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, metamotivation, self-actualizing persons, and peak experiences. Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969, and then became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1967, Maslow had an almost fatal heart attack, and knew his time was limited. Maslow considered himself to be a psychological pioneer. He gave future psychologists a push by bringing to light different paths to ponder. He built the framework that later allowed other psychologists to add in more information. Maslow long believed that leadership should be non-intervening. Consistent with this approach, he rejected a nomination in 1963 to be president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology because he felt that the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.
While jogging, Maslow suffered a severe heart attack and died on June 8, 1970 at the age of 62 in Menlo Park, California.