Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.
ROLLO MAYArtists 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.
More Rollo May Quotes
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Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
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A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
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A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
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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.
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The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.
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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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The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.
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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.
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One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
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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.
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It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
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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?
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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.
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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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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.
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Forge in the smithy of your soul.
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Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?
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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.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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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