The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly
ROLLO MAYHowever it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
ROLLO MAY -
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 MAY -
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 MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
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 MAY -
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
ROLLO MAY -
Forge in the smithy of your soul.
ROLLO MAY -
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
ROLLO MAY -
It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
ROLLO MAY -
The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
ROLLO MAY