People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
ROLLO MAYTherapy 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.
More Rollo May Quotes
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.
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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 dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
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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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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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Depression is the inability to construct a future.
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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
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Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
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Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth.
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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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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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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Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
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Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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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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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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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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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
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However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
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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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