When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
ROLLO MAYWhat if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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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.
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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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To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.
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One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
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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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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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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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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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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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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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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
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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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Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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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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It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.
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We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.
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Forge in the smithy of your soul.
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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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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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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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