"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 exi...

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 ~












More Rollo May quotes
"Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presen...
"Care is a state in which something does matter it is the source of human tenderness.
"Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
"Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and the...
"One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
"It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'implori...
"Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecu...
"I'm the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened
"Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassion...
"But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. ...
"in this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself o...
"anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resen...
"The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the ...
"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 ...