Top 100 Rollo May Quotes

#1. Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #9031
#2. On a more everyday level, our point is simply that when a person feels himself inwardly empty, as is the case with so many modern people, he experiences nature around him also as empty, dried up, dead. The two experiences of emptiness are two sides of the same state of impoverished relation to life.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #37371
#3. It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #45799
#4. Neurotic anxiety, therefore, is that which occurs when the incapacity for coping adequately with threats is not objective but subjective - I.e., is due not to objective weakness but to inner psychological patterns and conflicts which prevent the individual from using his powers.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #74396
#5. All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #90431
#6. There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #131675
#7. This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #134263
#8. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #218685
#9. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #234378
#10. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #261691
#11. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #274808
#12. It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #304005
#13. Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #330342
#14. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #333432
#15. Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #402239
#16. Whether we are 'Freudians' or not, as I am not, we are surely all post-Freudian. He set the tone for vast changes in our culture

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #416266
#17. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #421455
#18. Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #427575
#19. Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #442480
#20. The reaction is disproportionate to the objective danger because some intrapsychic conflict is involved. Thus the reaction is never disproportionate to the subjective threat.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #459869
#21. It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #508636
#22. Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that "elegance" - as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries - is a key to ultimate reality?

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #512010
#23. Something is born, comes into being, something which did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #526596
#24. One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #527139
#25. Joy is the effect which comes when we use our powers.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #527152
#26. Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #537268
#27. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #556061
#28. Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #561891
#29. One does not become fully human painlessly.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #562070
#30. The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #563966
#31. Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #575502
#32. Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #613234
#33. The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #615200
#34. If the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #617652
#35. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #630564
#36. Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #632344
#37. The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #633720
#38. The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #646519
#39. Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #694717
#40. In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #765010
#41. Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #791404
#42. It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings. (p. 16-17)

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #831208
#43. The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #843143
#44. When men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #848813
#45. This is a time, as Herman Hesse puts it, when a whole generation is caught ... between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #850007
#46. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #899093
#47. Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #911845
#48. Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #936281
#49. Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #990413
#50. I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1002611
#51. A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger
especially at danger in the social sciences
of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1003320
#52. I'm just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1024216
#53. A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1027052
#54. The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1034667
#55. Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1037635
#56. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1102903
#57. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1106450
#58. It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1122420
#59. That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1155412
#60. Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1175982
#61. In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1202482
#62. Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1210623
#63. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1212097
#64. Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1226910
#65. There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1240378
#66. By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1257831
#67. Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1261100
#68. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1268856
#69. In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1311138
#70. When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1360506
#71. Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1368464
#72. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1385595
#73. Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1399809
#74. The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1427223
#75. No one can separate themselves from one's social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1438289
#76. In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1444081
#77. Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1453233
#78. Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss ... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1468769
#79. If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. -Rollo May

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1483264
#80. But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1483360
#81. Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1492368
#82. One has to remain detached in order to triumph over others

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1499548
#83. The turtle only makes progress when it's neck is stuck out.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1529752
#84. The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1557599
#85. I'm the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1577327
#86. It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect ... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1584465
#87. Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1585005
#88. To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1594445
#89. The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1596758
#90. The "stuffed men" are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they "lean together"; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1630627
#91. The significant question is whether the activity pursued permits the release of tension without resolving the underlying conflict. If so, the conflict still remains, and hence the activity must be engaged in repeatedly. We then may have the beginning of compulsion neurosis.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1634985
#92. The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1649573
#93. There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1685597
#94. Conscious anxiety is more painful but it is available also to use in the service of integration of the self.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1713374
#95. Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1736744
#96. Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1751034
#97. Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1764489
#98. Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1778032
#99. The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or defiantly

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1836659
#100. The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes #1837429

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