Prior knowledge plays an important role in the process of image super-resolution reconstruction, which can constrain the solution space efficiently. In this paper, we utilized the fact that clear image exhibits stronger self-similarity property than other degradated version to present a new prior called maximizing nonlocal self-similarity for single image super-resolution. For describing the prior with mathematical language, a joint Gaussian mixture model was trained with LR and HR patch pairs extracted from the input LR image and its lower scale, and the prior can be described as a specific Gaussian distribution by derivation. In our algorithm, a large scale of sophisticated training and time-consuming nearest neighbor searching is not necessary, and the cost function of this algorithm shows closed form solution. The experiments conducted on BSD500 and other popular images demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms traditional methods and is competitive with the current state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.