Rollo May > Quotes

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
― Rollo May

“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“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.”
― Rollo May

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“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.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.”
― Rollo May

“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.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“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. (p. 21)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“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, The Courage to Create

“Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”
― Rollo May

“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”
― Rollo May

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth

“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
― Rollo May

“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“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.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“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)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." -Rollo May”
― Rollo May

“Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety