When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
ROLLO MAYCompetitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
More Rollo May Quotes
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It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
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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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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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Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
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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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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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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
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Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
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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.
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Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
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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.
ROLLO MAY






