Words matter. These are the best Rollo May Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, ‘Who am I?’
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.
While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.
Freedom always deals with ‘the possible’; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
Social acceptance, ‘being liked,’ has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn’t yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word ‘resolved,’ if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis – there would be only despair.
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.
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.
Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day – and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being – a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other.
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.
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.
One does not become fully human painlessly.
The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life’s predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.
Psychoanalysis – and any good therapy – is a method of increasing one’s awareness of destiny in order to increase one’s experience of freedom.
The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man’s capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm his own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness.
Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
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.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
