Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
ROLLO MAYCreativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
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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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A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
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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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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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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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This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
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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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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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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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 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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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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Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.
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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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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
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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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The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
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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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