One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
ROLLO MAYReal freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
More Rollo May Quotes
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
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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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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/
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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
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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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The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.
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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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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.
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Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
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In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
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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.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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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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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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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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This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.
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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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