"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself"
About this Quote
The intent sits squarely in Maslow’s humanistic project, where self-actualization isn’t a vibe but a developmental pressure. He’s arguing that people carry specific capacities that insist on expression. Deny them long enough and the cost shows up as restlessness, shame, and that uniquely modern anxiety of living a life that looks fine from the outside but feels misfiled on the inside. “Ultimately at peace” is carefully chosen: you can suppress the impulse for years and still function, but you’ll pay in chronic friction.
The subtext is quietly anti-capitalist without saying so. If your days are structured to serve institutions, metrics, or survival alone, Maslow suggests something in you will keep pushing back. It also cuts against the cult of potential. You don’t become a musician by collecting gear, reading interviews, or waiting for the perfect break; peace comes from practicing the identity into being.
Context matters: postwar America was selling conformity as stability. Maslow answers with a different promise: stability arrives when you stop negotiating with the part of you that knows what it’s here to do.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Evidence: A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. (Chapter: "A Theory of Human Motivation" (page number not verifiable from the available scan text)). This wording appears in Maslow’s own text in the section headed “THE NEED FOR SELF-ACTUALIZATION,” within the chapter “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in the 1954 book *Motivation and Personality*. In the same paragraph, Maslow immediately continues with the commonly-attached sentence: “What a man can be, he must be.” The scan I located is a user-uploaded HTML/PDF host, so it is useful for text verification but not ideal as a definitive bibliographic record for *first publication*. Many references also point to Maslow’s earlier journal article “A Theory of Human Motivation” (Psychological Review, 1943) with a slightly different wording (“ultimately happy” rather than “ultimately at peace with himself”). Without opening and verifying the 1943 article text directly here, I cannot confirm whether the *peace with himself* phrasing first appeared in 1943 or was introduced/standardized in the 1954 book edition. Other candidates (1) Finding God in the Devil's Music (Alex DiBlasi, Robert McParland, 2019) compilation95.4% ... Abraham Maslow , who was so interested in peak experiences , put it this way : " A musician must make music , an ... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Maslow, Abraham. (2026, February 27). A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-musician-must-make-music-an-artist-must-paint-a-29502/
Chicago Style
Maslow, Abraham. "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself." FixQuotes. February 27, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-musician-must-make-music-an-artist-must-paint-a-29502/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself." FixQuotes, 27 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-musician-must-make-music-an-artist-must-paint-a-29502/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2026.
