Rollo May quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rollo May

Rollo May Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rollo May on Wise Famous Quotes.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

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

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

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

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.

They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.

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

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.

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

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.

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

One has to remain detached in order to triumph over others

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

We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.

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

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

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.

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

Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.

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

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

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

Neurosis may be called a negating of possibilities; it is the shrinking up of one's world. The development of the self is this radically curtailed.

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

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

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

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

Creativity occurs as an act of encounter, and is to be understood with this encounter at the center.

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

I'm just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.

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

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

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

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.

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

Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man

The turtle only makes progress when it's neck is stuck out.

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

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

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

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

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

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

We receive love roughly in proportion to our capacity to love.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

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

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

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

This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

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

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

The personal freedom to think & feel & speak authentically & to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

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

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

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

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

Self-love is not only necessary and good, it is a prerequisite for loving others.

Conscious anxiety is more painful but it is available also to use in the service of integration of the self.