Rollo May Quotes

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.

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

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

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

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.

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

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.

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.

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

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

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

There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.

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

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

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

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

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

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

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

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

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or defiantly

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.

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

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

Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.

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

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

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

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

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact.

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.

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)

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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