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 is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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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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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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before
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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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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
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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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When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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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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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
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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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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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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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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