Rollo May Quotes

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

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

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)

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

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

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

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

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

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

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

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.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

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

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

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.

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

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

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

Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.

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

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

The turtle only makes progress when it's neck is stuck out.

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.

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

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.