Top 230 Quotes & Sayings by Rollo May - Page 2

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

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

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.

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.

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

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

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.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

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.

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.

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

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

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.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or defiantly

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.

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

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

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

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.

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

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

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims...That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

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.

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

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

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.

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

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.

Communication leads to community that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.

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

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

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)