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Who really said it

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

Attributed to Abraham Maslow 1908–1970 · American psychologist
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Credited to Maslow on every quote site, and it fits his humanistic psychology — but no book, paper, lecture or letter of his has ever been produced for it. English Wikiquote lists the sentence under “Attributed,” and the single citation anyone has ever attached points not to Maslow at all but to a 1972 juvenile marine-biology book by another author.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself” attributed to Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). No source in his published work has ever been located; the only citation ever offered is a 1972 book by another author. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Abraham Maslow — American psychologist, founder of humanistic psychology. Theme: "What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

What the trail actually contains

Attributed to
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970)
Maslow work cited
None located
Only citation offered
Life in the Open Sea
That book
William M. Stephens · McGraw-Hill, 1972 · 64 pp., juvenile marine ecology

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself. No primary source located

There is no surrounding passage to quote. The sentence circulates only as a free-standing aphorism — no located source text sits around it.

Wikiquote: Abraham Maslow, Attributed section

How we verified this

  • English Wikiquote files the sentence under Attributed, not among its dated, sourced Maslow quotations. Every entry in that section is referenced, if at all, to somebody else’s book rather than to Maslow’s own writing. Wikiquote: Abraham Maslow ↗
  • The lone citation ever attached is Life in the Open Sea (1972) by William M. Stephens, p. 21. Library cataloguing describes that title as a 64-page McGraw-Hill book on marine ecology, classified as juvenile literature and describing an open-sea food chain — not a work by Maslow, and published two years after his death in 1970. Open Library record ↗
  • In the revision that first put the line on Wikiquote, on 6 October 2005, it sat in the Attributed list with no citation of any kind. The Stephens reference was added to the page later. The 6 October 2005 revision ↗
  • The aggregators add nothing. AZQuotes reproduces the same Stephens reference; Goodreads gives the bare name with no source at all, under a standing notice that its quotes are community-submitted and unverified. Goodreads entry ↗

The wording’s origin is unknown, so no rights status can honestly be asserted for it. And it should not be treated as free to reuse on the assumption that it is old: Maslow’s books run from Principles of Abnormal Psychology, written with Béla Mittelmann (Harper & Brothers, 1941), through Motivation and Personality (1954) to The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971) — all published well inside the US copyright term, so none of it is public domain in the United States on age alone.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Why the citation collapses

This line is credited to Maslow everywhere and sourced to Maslow nowhere. Three things are worth separating.

Life in the Open Sea (1972) phantom source

Wikiquote and AZQuotes both point at p. 21 of this book. Library records catalogue it as a 64-page McGraw-Hill title by William M. Stephens on marine ecology, shelved as juvenile literature and describing an ocean food chain from diatom to sperm whale. It is not a work by Maslow, and it appeared two years after he died. Open Library ↗

AZQuotes, BrainyQuote, Goodreads circular

AZQuotes carries the identical Stephens reference rather than an independent one, and Goodreads offers no source whatsoever. Repetition across quote sites is not corroboration — it is one unverified claim copied many times. AZQuotes entry ↗

Abraham Maslow quote magnet

Even the Maslow line everyone knows is not cleanly his. Quote Investigator traces ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer’ to Maslow’s The Psychology of Science in 1966, but documents related formulations from Abraham Kaplan in 1962 and Silvan Tomkins in 1963. Quote Investigator ↗

The honest statement is narrow: this is a Maslow-shaped sentence with no Maslow source. Wikiquote itself files it under Attributed ↗, and nobody has yet produced a page of his that contains it.

Context

Why it sounds exactly like him

The attribution sticks because the thought is genuinely Maslow’s territory. His psychology put a person’s own picture of themselves at the centre of the work — self-esteem sitting just below self-actualization in the hierarchy that made his name, and self-actualization framed as something a person grows into rather than something done to them. A one-line summary of that programme would sound a great deal like this sentence.

Sounding right is not the same as being sourced, though, and that is the gap the quote sites paper over. Maslow published steadily from the 1940s until his death in 1970, and his major books are all in print and searchable. If the sentence were in one of them, it would be trivial to cite — and nobody has.

Sounding like Maslow is not the same as being Maslow.

Read the full story

The Wikiquote trail is instructive. The line arrived on the page in October 2005 with no source attached, in a batch of quotes an anonymous editor had lifted from the Wikipedia article. A reference was fitted to it years afterwards — and the reference it acquired was a children’s book about plankton and whales. That is what a retro-fitted citation looks like: a page number appears, but it does not lead back to the author.

None of which proves Maslow never wrote it. His output was large and includes journals, lectures and papers gathered after his death. It means only that the claim currently rests on nothing checkable, which is why this page stops at ‘attributed’ rather than reaching for ‘verified’ — or ‘disputed.’

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Change Growth Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Abraham Maslowen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line in the Attributed section, referenced only to William M. Stephens, Life In the Open Sea (1972), p. 21.
Wikiquote revision, 6 Oct 2005en.wikiquote.org

The revision that first added the sentence — in the Attributed list, with no citation at all.
Life in the open sea (1972)openlibrary.org

Catalogue record for the book Wikiquote cites: William M. Stephens, McGraw-Hill, 64 pages, marine ecology, juvenile literature.
Toward a Psychology of Being (1962)archive.org

Scan of Maslow's own 1962 Van Nostrand book — one of the works a real citation would have to point to.
Quote Investigator: hammer and nailquoteinvestigator.com

Traces Maslow's best-known line to The Psychology of Science (1966) while documenting earlier related versions by Kaplan and Tomkins.
Abraham Maslowen.wikipedia.org

Biography, life dates (1 April 1908 – 8 June 1970), and the publication years of his major books.

The man it is credited to

Who was Abraham Maslow?

Abraham Maslow

1908–1970 · American psychologist, founder of humanistic psychology

Abraham Harold Maslow taught at Brooklyn College and then Brandeis University, where he was a professor from 1951 to 1969. He is best known for the hierarchy of needs and for Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), the books that put self-actualization into everyday language. He died in June 1970 — and several of the lines now quoted most often as his, this one among them, are known only from books published after that.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best available citation

No primary source located. Attributed to Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) without citation to any of his own works; English Wikiquote lists the line under “Attributed,” where the only reference given is William M. Stephens, Life in the Open Sea (McGraw-Hill, 1972), 21 — a juvenile marine-biology book by another author, published two years after Maslow’s death.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/what-is-necessary-to-change-a-person-is-to-change-his/

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