The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
ROLLO MAYWhen I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
ROLLO MAY -
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
ROLLO MAY -
The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.
ROLLO MAY -
Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence/
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 -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
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 -
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
ROLLO MAY -
So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
ROLLO MAY -
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
ROLLO MAY -
Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
ROLLO MAY -
Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
ROLLO MAY -
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
ROLLO MAY -
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
ROLLO MAY -
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
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.
ROLLO MAY -
Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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 -
One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.
ROLLO MAY -
Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?
ROLLO MAY