Rollo May Quotes
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.
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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.
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Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society - Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
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Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
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People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.
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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.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.