Rollo May
Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.Collection: People
By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.Collection: Creativity
Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.Collection: Creativity
All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.Collection: Meaningful
Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.Collection: Struggle
Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.Collection: Running
If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.Collection: Depressing
Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved.Collection: Beach
Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.Collection: Unique
Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.Collection: Running
The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.Collection: Dream
I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.Collection: Heart
Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.Collection: Courage
When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.Collection: Reading
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
In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.Collection: Errors
Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.Collection: Life
The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.Collection: Plato
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.Collection: Lines
Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.Collection: Unique
Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.Collection: Relaxation
The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence.Collection: Men
One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.Collection: Able
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. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term "hero" is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man.Collection: Courage
They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.Collection: Mean
Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.Collection: Beautiful
This is hard for parents to say genuinely.Collection: Parent
We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.Collection: Commitment
The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.Collection: Ideas