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.
ROLLO MAYWhen people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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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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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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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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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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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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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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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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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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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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Every 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.
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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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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.
ROLLO MAY