Rollo May Quotes

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

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.

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings." (p. 16-17)

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

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.

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.