Rollo May Quotes

It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.

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.

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.

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

Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

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

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

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

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

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

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

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

They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.

This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

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

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

Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.

We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

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

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

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

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

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

Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

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

Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

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

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

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

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

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.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths...

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

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 existence of the personality.

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

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21)

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.

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

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 problems with perspective.

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

Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.

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

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.