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.
ROLLO MAYUnderstanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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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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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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There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
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Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
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The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.
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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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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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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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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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This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.
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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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Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
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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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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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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
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Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
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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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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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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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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.
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