The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
ROLLO MAYThe relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
ROLLO MAYBeauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
ROLLO MAYWhat if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
ROLLO MAYCompetitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
ROLLO MAYCourage 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 MAYTo believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.
ROLLO MAYThe essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.
ROLLO MAYVanity 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.
ROLLO MAYThe acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
ROLLO MAYIt is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.
ROLLO MAYWhat 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.
ROLLO MAYThis personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.
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.
ROLLO MAYLife comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
ROLLO MAYThe 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.
ROLLO MAYAnxiety 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.
ROLLO MAY