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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Rollo May

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.
ROLLO MAY

Against Around Defence Delight Good Tightly Truth Well Wound
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

Genius Important Invention Need Person Society Strength Supermen Themselves
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
ROLLO MAY

Contemporary Culture Impoverishment Popular Profoundly Proof Strong Through
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.
ROLLO MAY

Capacity Constructive Creativity Must One Order Ope Solitude Use
All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
ROLLO MAY

All Artist Ecraetive Life One People Some Struggle Succeeded Task Way
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
ROLLO MAY

Make Myth Sense Senseless Way World
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.
ROLLO MAY

Arise Between Creativity Limitation Spontaneously Tension
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.
ROLLO MAY

Artist Chaos Create Form Genesis God Immerse Into Love Order Out Themselves
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
ROLLO MAY

Arise Out Power Powerlessness Superfully Violence
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?
ROLLO MAY

Courage Effect Inescapable Intimacy Know Outlet Relationship Require Risk
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
ROLLO MAY

Beauty Experience Give Joy Peace Sense Simultaneously
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 MAY

Distance Feel Healthy Humor Look Perspective Problem Self Stand Way
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.
ROLLO MAY

Authentically Conscious Distinguish Doing Feel Freedom Think Human Personal Quality Speak
When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
ROLLO MAY

Human Individual Responsibility Significance Suffer
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
ROLLO MAY

Deed Establish Esteem Largely Perform Self Society Those Try Violence
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.
ROLLO MAY

Courage Crucial Decision Freedom Hour Little Occasional Only Own Person Place REquired

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

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