Rollo May - Courage to Create (1972)

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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
Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.

Rollo May
Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.

Rollo May
Imagination is the outreaching of mind … the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to "dream dreams and see visions..."

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

Rollo May
Mass communication — wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued — presents us with a serious danger, 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.

Rollo May