Best 230 quotes of Rollo May on MyQuotes

A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

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

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

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

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

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.

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

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

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.

Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.

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.

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

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.

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

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.

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

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

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

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.

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.

Creative people... 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 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.

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.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

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

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

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

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.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

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.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

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

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)

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

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

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact.

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.

Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.

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

Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .

Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man

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.

Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.

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