Rollo May
That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.Collection: Attitude
Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.Collection: Teacher
It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.Collection: Moving
The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.Collection: Heart
One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment.Collection: Leadership
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.Collection: Joy
In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.Collection: Sycophants
Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious.Collection: Technique
We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.Collection: Inspirational
We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.Collection: Religious
We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.Collection: Creativity
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.Collection: Art
The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.Collection: Love Is
Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.Collection: Mean
What is courage? This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.Collection: Country
All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.Collection: Struggle
Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.Collection: Inspiring
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.Collection: Doe
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.Collection: Consciousness
When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.Collection: Time
The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.Collection: Flower
Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.Collection: Creativity
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.Collection: Nihilism
The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.Collection: Struggle
Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.Collection: Creative
Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims...That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy.Collection: Courage
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.Collection: Fighting
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.Collection: Reality
The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.Collection: Strong
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.Collection: Courage
Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.Collection: Meaningful
It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.Collection: Running
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.Collection: Violence
Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)Collection: Rebel
There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.Collection: Change
Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.Collection: People
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.Collection: Culture
It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Block
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.Collection: Risk
One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.Collection: Needs
Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.Collection: Fighting
Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their ownCollection: Choices
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.Collection: Beauty
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.Collection: Life
Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.Collection: Artist
Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.Collection: Confused
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.Collection: Running
What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.Collection: Courage