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 MAYAll people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
More Rollo May Quotes
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
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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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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.
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A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
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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.
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Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
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So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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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.
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Forge in the smithy of your soul.
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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.
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
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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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