Top 230 Quotes & Sayings by Rollo May

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

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.

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.

Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.

The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.

Human dignity is based upon freedom, and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the other.

The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying.

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

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

One does not become fully human painlessly.

Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.

While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.

Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.

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.

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

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

It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.

Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm his own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness.

Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.

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

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

Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.

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

I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.

I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.

In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be.

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.

I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being - a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.

If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.

The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life's predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.

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.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.

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

Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.

The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.

We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going.

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.

Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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