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 MAYIt is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.
More Rollo May Quotes
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The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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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.
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Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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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.
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To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.
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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.
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The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly
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Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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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.
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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
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What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.
ROLLO MAY