Rollo May Quotes

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

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, then you will have betrayed yourself

Depression is the inability to construct a future

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

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

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

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.

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

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. (p. 21)

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.

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.

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

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? 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.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.