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.
ROLLO MAYThere can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
ROLLO MAY -
Forge in the smithy of your soul.
ROLLO MAY -
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
ROLLO MAY -
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
ROLLO MAY -
Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.
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 -
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 -
So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
ROLLO MAY -
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
ROLLO MAY -
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
ROLLO MAY -
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?
ROLLO MAY -
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 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 -
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
ROLLO MAY -
There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
ROLLO MAY