What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
ROLLO MAYEvery human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
More Rollo May Quotes
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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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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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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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
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Depression is the inability to construct a future.
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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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Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
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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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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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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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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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This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
ROLLO MAY