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 MAYLove is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
ROLLO MAY -
Forge in the smithy of your soul.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
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 -
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.
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?
ROLLO MAY -
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 -
Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
ROLLO MAY -
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 -
Vanity and narcissism – the compulsive need to be admired and praised – undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.
ROLLO MAY -
Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
ROLLO MAY -
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
ROLLO MAY -
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.
ROLLO MAY