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.
ROLLO MAYApathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
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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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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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Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
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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 is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
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We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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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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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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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Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
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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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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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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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There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.
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One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
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A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
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