Abraham Harold Maslow, he the crafter of the oft quoted line, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (He also went Jerry Lee Lewis on his first cousin and married her so he wasn't above being a bit creepy too.) He was also the one who came up with that whole hierarchy of needs/self-actualization pyramid you were forced to study in Psych 101.

He also wrote a number of things worth quoting and as someone who was preparing to follow a career into law to satisfy his parents' wishes and not his own he seemed to understand a thing or two about the challenges of the artist. Said he:

• If you deliberately set out to be less than you are capable, you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

• It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

• 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.

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

• Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Stolen in its entirety from the wonderful blog Writer's Write.