Rollo May Quotes
An American existential psychologist.
(1909 - 1994)
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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.
[Anxiety]
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Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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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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Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
[Courage]
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Courage isrequired 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.
[Courage]
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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.
[Creativity]
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Depression is the inability to construct a future.
[Psychiatry]
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Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
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Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
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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 problems with perspective.
[Events]
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I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
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If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.
[Forgiveness]
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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.
[Instincts]
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In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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.
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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.
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Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
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