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.
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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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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Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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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