Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
ROLLO MAYCreativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.
More Rollo May Quotes
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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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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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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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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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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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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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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.
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In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
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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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Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
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Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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