Einbert > Einbert's Quotes

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow

“It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow

“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

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be”
― Abraham Maslow

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”
― Abraham Maslow

“We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.”
― Abraham Maslow

“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

“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 H. Maslow

“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

“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

“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other. We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy

“love obsession often serves as a distraction, keeping the individual’s gaze from more painful thoughts.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy

“The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”
― Abraham Maslow

“What one can be, one must be!”
― Abraham H. Maslow

“If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Self-actualized people...live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.”
― Abraham Maslow, Hierarchy of Needs: A Theory of Human Motivation

“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.”
― Abraham Maslow

“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow

“It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that person can be.”
― Abraham Maslow

“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.”
― Abraham Maslow

“False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.”
― Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

“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.”
― Abraham Maslow

“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.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Seeing is better than being blind, even when seeing hurts.”
― Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

“The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.”
― Abraham Maslow

“In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

“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

“If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”
― Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature