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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Rollo May

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
ROLLO MAY

Anything Effective Feel Live Most People Powerless
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 MAY

Anxiety Condition Essential Human
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
ROLLO MAY

Absence Ahead Capacity Courage Despair Move Rather Spite
Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
ROLLO MAY

Deep Feeling Hope Imprint Keeper Meaningful Memory Past Time Upon
This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
ROLLO MAY

Heroism Identity Important Make Mold Reflect Sense
Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
ROLLO MAY

Being Courage Make Necessary Possible
All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
ROLLO MAY

Artist Brush Communicating Feeling Like Meaningful Paint Share Something Way World
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
ROLLO MAY

Alone Fear Find Many Oneself People Suffer
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

Citizen Courage Enable Find Hero Ideal Necessary Order Own Society Wisdom
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

Courage Crucial Decision Freedom Hour Little Occasional Only Own Person Place REquired
So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
ROLLO MAY

Courage Fascimile Possible Psychologivcal Value Virtue
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

Absorb Around Become Caught Completely Obvious Something Thing You
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
ROLLO MAY

Art Experience Fountainhead Frost Human Imagination
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

Courage Effect Inescapable Intimacy Know Outlet Relationship Require Risk
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
ROLLO MAY

Active Cure Heal Learn Myself Need Participate Process
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

Against Around Defence Delight Good Tightly Truth Well Wound

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

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Popular Authors

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