What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.
ROLLO MAYPeople attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
More Rollo May Quotes
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.
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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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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.
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Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
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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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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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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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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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Vanity and narcissism – the compulsive need to be admired and praised – undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.
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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.
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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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Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.
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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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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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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
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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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This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
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Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.
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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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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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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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