Rollo May Quotes

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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

~ Rollo May

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

~ Rollo May

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

~ Rollo May

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

~ Rollo May

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. (p. 100)

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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)

~ Rollo May

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. (p. 13)

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

~ Rollo May

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.

~ Rollo May

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. But out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society.

~ Rollo May

But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness—“You’ll get these abundant gratifications only if you don’t feel too much, don’t let on you want too much.” The result is that, instead of conquering the world like Horatio Alger, we should wait passively until the genie of technology—which we don’t push or influence, only await—brings us our appointed gratifications. All of this is a part of the rewards which go with belief in the vast myth of the machine in the twentieth century.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

~ Rollo May

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.

~ Rollo May

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

~ Rollo May

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

~ Rollo May

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'.

~ Rollo May

Life is not a matter for simple optimism--for there is evil, nor for mere pessimism--for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.

~ Rollo May

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

~ Rollo May

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

~ Rollo May

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.

~ Rollo May

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

~ Rollo May

It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.

~ Rollo May

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

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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.

~ Rollo May

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

~ Rollo May

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

~ Rollo May

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.

~ Rollo May

Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination.

~ Rollo May