Abraham Maslow

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

Source: Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham H. Maslow, 1962

This is Maslow's core safety-versus-growth dialectic, which he develops explicitly in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), especially the 'Defense and Growth' material where he frames each moment as a choice between the delights/anxieties of safety and those of growth. The line is consistently attributed to that book across psychology literature and I recall it as Maslow's own phrasing rather than a paraphrase. I cannot confirm a page number from memory, so this is strong secondary rather than page-verified.