Rollo May Quotes - Page 4

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

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

It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.

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

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

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.

Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.

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.

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

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.