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 MAYThe acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
More Rollo May Quotes
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Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
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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.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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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.
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Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.
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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
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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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When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
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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 easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.
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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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All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
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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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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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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