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.
I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, in the extent to which you have used your gifts and talents to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow men. In your hands lies the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best qualities of your own spirit.
But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.
There's a taste in my mouth and it's no taste at all.
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