Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Rollo May
Rollo May Quotes
136 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking.
Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
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.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
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.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no."
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Courage is required 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.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
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.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint — they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
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.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt — these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. … My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.
Rollo May
Source
Report...
One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
Rollo May
1
2
3
4
5
6
Quote of the day
The best and fastest way to learn a sport is to watch and imitate a champion.
Jean-Claude Killy
Rollo May
Born:
April 21, 1909
Died:
October 22, 1994
(aged 85)
Bio:
Rollo Reece May was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will.
Known for:
Love and Will (1969)
Courage to Create (1972)
Man's Search for Himself (1953)
The Meaning of Anxiety (1950)
The Cry for Myth (1991)
Most used words:
human
,
person
,
courage
,
reality
,
form
,
man
,
life
,
anxiety
,
meaning
,
experience
,
daimonic
,
individual
,
sense
,
love
,
people
Rollo May on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Rollo May Quotes
Rollo May Short Quotes
Quotes about Rollo May
American Psychiatrist Quotes
Psychiatrist Quotes
20th-century Psychiatrist Quotes
Related People
Carl Rogers
American Psychologist
Viktor Frankl
Austrian Psychiatrist
Irvin D. Yalom
American Psychologist
Abraham Maslow
American Psychologist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes