Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.
Interpretation
Common sense is about accepting reality, while creative individuals strive to envision and create a better world.
Abraham Maslow highlights the contrast between conforming to the current state of the world, which is characterized by common sense, and the mindset of creative individuals who seek to challenge the status quo. This quote suggests that while common sense may encourage acceptance and adaptation, creativity drives innovation and the desire to transform reality into something better than it currently is.
In practice
In a discussion about innovation in business, one might say, 'As Abraham Maslow noted, common sense confines us, but creativity can lead to transformative ideas.'
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.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
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.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
Gay or straight? So what? It doesn't matter to me. We have to be concerned about other people regardless.
The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.
Have "eternal wait," infinite patience. When you have infinite patience, you will realize God belongs to you. Either through awareness or through practice you reach the same spot.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.