Rollo May Quotations

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

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

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

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

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

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

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

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

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

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

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.

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

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

Imagination is the outreaching of mind . . . . the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to "dream dreams and see visions . . . .

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

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity.It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personalvalues.

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

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.

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

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.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

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

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society Socrates , Christ , Freud , all the way down the line.

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

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

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

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.

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

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

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.

A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

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

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.

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.

What is courage? This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

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

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.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

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

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." ... this 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 purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

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

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

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

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

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.

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

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

Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

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

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

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

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

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.

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

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

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

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

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

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

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.

We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

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.

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

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

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

They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean.

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.

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

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

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

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

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

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

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

The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

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

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.

To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.

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.