Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
ROLLO MAYThere can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
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When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
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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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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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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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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 ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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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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All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
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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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Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.
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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.
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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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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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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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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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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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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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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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.
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