― Rollo May
“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“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.”
― Rollo May
“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.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May
“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.”
― Rollo May
“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“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.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”
― Rollo May
“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”
― Rollo May
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May
“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
― Rollo May, 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.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
“The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
― Rollo May
“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own”
― Rollo May
“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
― Rollo May, Existence
“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.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,
“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”
Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.”
― Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology
“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”
― Rollo May
“Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union”
― Rollo May
“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.”
― Rollo May
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“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man”
― Rollo May
“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.”
― Rollo May
“There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.”
― Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence
“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...”
― Rollo May
“One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.”
― Rollo May
“When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“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 these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.”
― Rollo May
“What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extend that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relations to the inarticulate, or, if you will, 'unconscious' levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world." (pg 52)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“They showed considerable anxiety because they were in the process of loving beauty.”
― Rollo May
“But there comes a point (and this is the challenge facing modern technological Western man) when the cult of technique destroys feeling, undermines passion, and blots out individual identity. The technologically efficient lover...has lost the power to be carried away; he knows only too well what he is doing. At this point, technology diminishes consciousness and demolishes eros. Tools are no longer an enlargement of consciousness but a substitute for it and, indeed, tend to repress and truncate it.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“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." --”
― Rollo May
“Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.”
― Rollo May
“For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us?...The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back?...
This...has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be //sure// God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will
“when men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“Life is not a matter for simple optimism--for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism--for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.”
― Rollo May, The Art of Counseling
“Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern man, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being “hollow” and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but a genuine union.”
― Rollo May, Love & Will
“Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that “elegance”—as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries—is a key to ultimate reality?”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn’t. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism.
— Rollo May, “The Tragedy of Truth About Oneself” (The Psycology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective by Kirk Schneider and Rollo May), pp. 14-15”
― Rollo May, The Psychology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective
“In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
“The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“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.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
“I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
