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.
ROLLO MAYMemory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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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 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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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
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Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.
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All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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