Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?
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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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
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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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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.
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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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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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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.
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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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Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
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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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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.
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It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
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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.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us?
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Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
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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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A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
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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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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
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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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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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Memory 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.
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