Rollo May
The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.Collection: Errors
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.Collection: Courage
The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.Collection: People
Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.Collection: Drug
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.Collection: Art
Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.Collection: Passion
Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.Collection: Fighting
Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.Collection: Attitude
Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.Collection: Maturity
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or defiantlyCollection: Courage
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 problem with perspective.Collection: Distance
Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.Collection: Dedication
The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.Collection: Lines
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.Collection: Relationship
... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.Collection: Creativity
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.Collection: Love
Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)Collection: Artist
Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.Collection: Responsibility
Communication leads to community that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.Collection: Communication
Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.Collection: Hurt
Forge in the smithy of your soul.Collection: Soul
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.Collection: Flare Up
No one can separate themselves from one's social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community.Collection: Personality
Courage is required 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.Collection: Courage
Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.Collection: Care
Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!Collection: Phrases
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Powerful
When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.Collection: Life
We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.Collection: Love
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.Collection: Stronger
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.Collection: Worry
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.Collection: Creativity
Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.Collection: Running
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Relationship
Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.Collection: Courage
The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.Collection: Block
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?Collection: Art
Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.Collection: Purpose
Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.Collection: Creativity
Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)Collection: Country
A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.Collection: Anxiety
Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.Collection: Courage
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.Collection: Self Esteem
Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.Collection: Way
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.Collection: Reality
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.Collection: Healing
A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.Collection: Perspective