All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
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
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There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
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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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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
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Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.
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Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.
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Depression is the inability to construct a future.
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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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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us?
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Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
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What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
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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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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
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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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Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?
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