Rollo May Quotes - Page 2

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." (p. 16-17)

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.

But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.

I think Dostoevsky was right that 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.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as “given” to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a “creative person,” but only of a creative act.

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...

But are we not at the point where we can no longer make the distinction between normal and neurotic? Do we not all have these conflicts, in greater or lesser degree? And do not all conflicts move into contradiction at some point? When all is said and done, all anxiety arises from conflicts, with its origin in the conflict between being and nonbeing, between one's existence and that which threatens it. All of us, no matter how 'neurotic' or 'normal,' experience the gap between our expectations and reality. This distinction becomes less important, and I believe we must look at all anxiety, preferably without special labels, as part of the human condition.

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.

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

Courage isrequired 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.

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.

Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark, 'One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man'. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, 'Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat'.

Sisyphus,' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher,' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny.

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.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.