Rollo May Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Mass communication
wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued
presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

Rollo May

#3. 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

#4. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.

Rollo May

#5. When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

Rollo May

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.

Rollo May

#10. 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

#11. There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

Rollo May

#12. This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

Rollo May

#13. Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

Rollo May

#14. I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.

Rollo May

#15. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

Rollo May

#16. Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

Rollo May

#17. To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

Rollo May

#18. 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

#19. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

Rollo May

#20. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

Rollo May

#21. 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

#22. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Rollo May

#23. Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

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#24. 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

#25. The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.

Rollo May

#26. 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

#27. They showed considerable anxiety because they were in the process of loving beauty.

Rollo May

#28. Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Rollo May

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.

Rollo May

#32. Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Rollo May

#33. 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

#34. 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.

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#35. Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.

Rollo May

#36. Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

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#37. Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

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#38. The reaction is disproportionate to the objective danger because some intrapsychic conflict is involved. Thus the reaction is never disproportionate to the subjective threat.

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#39. Myth safeguards and enforces morality, as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality.

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#40. Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

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#41. Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.

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#42. Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.

Rollo May

#43. It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.

Rollo May

#44. 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?

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

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#46. One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment.

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#47. Joy is the effect which comes when we use our powers.

Rollo May

#48. People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

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#49. Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

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#50. Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.

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#51. It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

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#52. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Rollo May

#53. Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

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#54. One does not become fully human painlessly.

Rollo May

#55. 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.

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#56. 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.

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#57. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

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#58. Fear ordinarily does not lead to illness if the organism can flee successfully . If the individual cannot flee, but is forced to remain in a conflict situation which cannot be resolved, fear may turn into anxiety and psychosomatic changes may then accompany e anxiety.

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#59. One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

Rollo May

#60. 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.

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#61. 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.

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#62. 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.

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#63. One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism.

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#64. The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

Rollo May

#65. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Rollo May

#66. Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.

Rollo May

#67. The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

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#68. 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.

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#69. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.

Rollo May

#70. One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

Rollo May

#71. Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Rollo May

#72. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms ... against the unconscious.

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#73. The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

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#74. Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.

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#75. The person with neurotic anxiety endeavors to run away from some elements within herself or himself. This can be accomplished only by dissociating these elements, which sets up inner contradictions.

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#76. 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.

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#77. They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean.

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#78. Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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#79. The creative process must be explored ... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

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#80. Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

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#81. The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

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#82. 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.

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#83. Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.

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#84. Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

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#85. Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

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#86. A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

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#87. 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)

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#88. 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.

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#89. 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.

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#90. 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.

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#91. It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

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#92. Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

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#93. If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.

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#94. The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.

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#95. One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

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#96. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

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#97. Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.

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#98. Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.

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#99. It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

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#100. Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.

Rollo May