Top 230 Quotes & Sayings by Rollo May - Page 4

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)

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

The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies being human also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.

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

This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

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.

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

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

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

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.

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

They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.

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.

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

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

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.

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

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

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

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

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.

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

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

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

The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

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

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

The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.

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.

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

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.

When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.

Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.

It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

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.

In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.

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