“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.”
— Rollo May
“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
“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)”
— Rollo May
“Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can “be”, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.”
— Rollo May
“A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.”
— Rollo May
“Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.”
— Rollo May
“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
— Rollo May
“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”
— 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? 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.”
— Rollo May
“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.”
— Rollo May
“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
— Rollo May
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.”
– Rollo May
“The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it’s not without doubt but in spite of doubt.”
– Rollo May
“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
– Rollo May
“Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”
– Rollo May
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
– Rollo May
“Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.”
– Rollo May
“Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.”
– Rollo May
“It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.”
– Rollo May
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.”
– Rollo May
“Courage is not the absence of despair it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”
– Rollo May
“Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.”
– Rollo May