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 MAYThe creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.
ROLLO MAY -
One does not become fully human painlessly.
ROLLO MAY -
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 MAY -
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
ROLLO MAY -
This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
ROLLO MAY -
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
ROLLO MAY -
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
ROLLO MAY -
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 -
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
ROLLO MAY -
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
ROLLO MAY -
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
ROLLO MAY -
Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
ROLLO MAY -
Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
ROLLO MAY