Awaken The World Through Enlightened Media

Quotes by Rollo May

February 12, 2022
Total Views: 4124

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.”
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”
“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
“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.”
“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.”
“Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
“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.”
“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
“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.”
“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
“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.”
“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
“To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before”
“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.”
“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
“The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home…To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths…”
“It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with suffering of one’s fellow human beings.”
“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 own”
“Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values.”
“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,
“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”
Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.”
“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.”
“Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union”
“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.”