Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
ROLLO MAYCourage 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.
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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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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When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/
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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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Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.
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Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.
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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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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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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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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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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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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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Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.
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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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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
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Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.
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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.
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Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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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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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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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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