Sourced

• 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.
  • Motivation and Personality (1954)

• I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
  • The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966), Ch. 2 p. 15 ; although some similar statements to describe fundamental errors in human perception had been expressed before Maslow's, his expression, or slight paraphrases of it, remains among the most popular.

• 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.
  • The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971)

Unsourced

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

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

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

• If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

• 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.

• 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