Rollo May Quotes (135 quotes, page 2) | Quotes of famous people

“Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 32
Context: Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

World

“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.”

Rollo May

Ch 3 : Creativity and the Unconcious, p. 59
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: 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.

Thinking , Personality

“Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so.”

Rollo May

Ch 3 : Creativity and the Unconcious, p. 76
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.

Freedom

“Power is required for communication.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 12 : Toward New Community
Context: 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.

Communication

“Civilization begins with a rebellion.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
Context: Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day.

“We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 126
Context: We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.
The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimonic as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature's tool. … consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal.

Reality

“Both artists and neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 21

Men , Communication

“Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “Follow not me, but you!””

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 76

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 243

Sad , Future

“The practical implication is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 235

Freedom

“Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.”

Rollo May book The Meaning of Anxiety

The Meaning of Anxiety (1950)

Education , Reality , Teachers

“It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 13

People , Problem

“In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.”

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54-55

Life , Science

“Increasingly in our time — this is an inevitable result of collectivization — it is the organization man who succeeds. And he is characterized by the fact that he has significance only if he gives up his significance.”

Rollo May

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 37

Time

“The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 49

Pain , People , Way , Sense

“True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such a political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. … the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin.”

Rollo May

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

Life , Men , Change , Fight

“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

Feeling , Courage , Fight

“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

People , Feeling , Sense , Suffering

“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

People , World , Communication , Sense

“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

Courage

“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

Truth , Search

“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

Way , Nature

“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

World

“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)

Personality

“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

Freedom

“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

Question , Science , Personality

“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

Courage , Suffering

“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

Life , World , Way , Imagination

“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

Freedom

“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)

Color , Idea , Painting

“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

Imagination

“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

Despair

“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

Love , Sex , Way

“In the winter of 1841 Schelling gave his famous series of lectures at the University of Berlin before a distinguished audience including Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels, Bakunin. Schelling set out to overthrow Hegel, whose vast rationalist system including the identification of abstract truth with reality and the bringing of all history into an “absolute whole,” held immense and dominant popularity in the Europe of the middle of the nineteenth century. – 1844 Kierkegaard published Philosophical Fragments, and two years later he wrote the declaration of independence for existentialism, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Also in 1844 there appeared the second edition of Schopenhauer’s The world as will and idea,.. central emphasis “will” along with “idea” -- two related works by Marx 1844-45 – “attacked abstract truth’ as “ideology” “using Hegel as his whipping boy” “men and groups bring truth into being” “money economy turns people into things””

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54

Men , Money , People , Truth

“When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 84

Love , Feeling , Confidence , Sense

“The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 40

People , Health

“You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 7 : Passion for Form, p. 127

World , Sense

“While the daimonic cannot be said to be evil in itself, it confronts us with the troublesome dilemma of whether it is to be used with awareness, a sense of responsibility and the significance of life, or blindly and rashly.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 129

Life , Sense , Evil

“Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 29

Inspirational , love , Love , Hate

“In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fosilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where "normality" is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to have intercourse without committing yourself — in such a schizoid world, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 32

Love , Life , People , World

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”

Rollo May

Max Frisch in Homo Faber : A Report (1957) Pt. 2
Misattributed

World

“There is considerable danger that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy and adjustment psychology, will become new representations of the fragmentation of man, that they will exemplify the loss of the individual's vitality and significance, rather than the reverse, that the new techniques will assist in standardizing and giving cultural sanction to man's alienation from himself rather than solving it, that they will become expressions of the new mechanization of man, now calculated and controlled with greater psychological precision and on a vaster scale of unconscious and depth dimensions — that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general will become part of the neurosis of our day rather than part of the cure. This would indeed be a supreme irony of history. It is not alarmism nor the showing of unseemly fervor to point out these tendencies, some of which are already upon us. It is simply to look directly at our historical situation and to draw unflinchingly the implications.”

Rollo May

Source: Existence (1958), p. 35; also published in The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 86

History , Loss , Parting , Drawing

“Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 220

Fear , Hope , Memory , Time

“Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.”

Rollo May

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 30

“Note the startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Socrates, Jesus, William Blake, Buddha, Krishna — the list is as endless as it is rich.”

Rollo May

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

History

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 12

Communication , Idea

“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”

Rollo May

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

Understanding , Study , Science

“However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.”

Rollo May

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

Fight