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“Physical courage in whatever scene … seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 8 : Ecstasy and Violence, p. 176

“When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.”

Rollo May

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 31

“Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 56

“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: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 21

“The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 214

“One does not become fully human painlessly.”

Rollo May

Foreword to Existential-Phenomenological Alternatives for Psychology (1978) by Ronald S. Valle and Mark King

“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 book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 17

“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: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel

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

Rollo May

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 49
The Courage to Create (1975)

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 100

“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 book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 313

“The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.”

Rollo May

Source: Existence (1958), p. 13; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 52

“It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 16

“This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding — can participate in the constituting of reality — only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 7 : Passion for Form, p. 134

“Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 138

“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

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 41
The Courage to Create (1975)

“Those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists — the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images — poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 22

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 24

“There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no."”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel

“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 book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 15