Rollo May Quotes

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or ...

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent an...

Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He ...

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundat...

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and...

It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing....

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, t...

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would pu...

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

It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identif...

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as takin...

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering o...

Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral cons...

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relation...

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the founda...

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is s...

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is heal...

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce wo...

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

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even ...

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

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

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

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he...

We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits...

I'm the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being ...

Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild ...

But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not ...

in this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's me...

anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly p...

The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - tha...

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick pe...

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. B...

But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your ...

The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a d...

Neurotic anxiety, therefore, is that which occurs when the incapacity for coping adequately with thr...

One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerle...

In the individual who is characterized by independence without corresponding relatedness, there will...

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An an...

It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not...

But are we not at the point where we can no longer make the distinction between normal and neurotic?...

Sisyphus,' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemne...

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

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make...

Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by conde...

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

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

If you do not express your own original ideas if you do not listen to your own being you will have...

Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is heal...

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to thr...

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselve...

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

Courage isrequired not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom but in th...

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have...

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some...

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of s...

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new r...

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons longing as all individuals do to overcome t...

In my clinical experience the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a w...

The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge ...

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from bore...

I think Dostoevsky was right that every human being must have a point at which he stands against th...

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome t...

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

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's convictions-not o...

Care is a state in which something does matter it is the source of human tenderness.

But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness—“You’ll get these abundant gratific...

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon t...

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

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powe...

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so ti...

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be expe...

The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function wh...

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the cre...

Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creatin...

Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem a way of standing...

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give signifi...

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - ...

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person withou...

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

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our cultu...

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

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

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One ...

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfil...

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

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

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be marrie...