A Quote by Rollo May

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

Quote Topics

Awareness Based Between Capacity Choose Consciousness Create Freedom Human Human Freedom Inseparable Involves Our Ourselves Pause Response Self Self-Awareness Stimulus Stimulus And Response Throw Toward Weight Which Wish

Quote Author

Rollo May
American - Psychologist
April 21, 1909 - October 22, 1994

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

Rollo May

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

Rollo May

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor E. Frankl

Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response

Sharon Salzberg

Your mind, in order to defend itself starts to give life to inanimate objects. When that happens it solves the problem of stimulus and response because literally if you're by yourself you lose the element of stimulus and response. Somebody asks a question, you give a response. So, when you lose the stimulus and response, what I connected to is that you actually create all the stimulus and response.

Willi Smith

Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.

Viktor E. Frankl

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

Stephen Covey

Mindfulness is a pause - the space between stimulus and response: that's where choice lies.

Tara Brach

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Stephen Covey

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

Rollo May

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

Stephen Covey

We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger.

Stephen Covey

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.

Erich Fromm

Choice is the key, because human beings are the only creatures who can choose to evolve, who can shape their destiny. Furthermore, we have been given the gift of "self-awareness," which allows us to step back into our true selves to observe and use our brains to create the world we wish to live in.

Deepak Chopra

When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional resources. The challenge...is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.