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.
ROLLO MAYMass 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)
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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When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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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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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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Forge in the smithy of your soul.
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Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
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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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All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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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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Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
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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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Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
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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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