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.
ROLLO MAYGood 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.
More Rollo May Quotes
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The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly
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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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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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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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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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 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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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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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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The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
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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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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.
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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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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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One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
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When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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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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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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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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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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Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
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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 necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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This is what our society needs – not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.
ROLLO MAY