“World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment.”

— Rollo May

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 50
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates…" by Rollo May?

Rollo May photo

Rollo May 135

US psychiatrist 1909–1994

Related quotes

“By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, natuaralism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience.”

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) French philosopher

The Theory Of Intuition In Husserls Phenomenology 1963, 1995 p. 9

“There has been the assumption that men are finite spirits. They are, that is to say, not only animals with a brief terrestrial existence, but in them is an element which comes from, and belongs to, the spiritual world. This world we postulate to be the world of eternal reality, of God; and we assume that in it whatever is of God, the things that are good, beautiful and true, will exist for ever with Him. We have then, to justify our belief that, because such God-like qualities exist in human personality, that personality will survive the destruction of the body.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

p, 125
Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)

“What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 50
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

“[S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter IX Sirius and Religion.

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

“There is no methodological process by which one can confirm the existence of an object independent of the confirmatory process involving oneself. The outside is a void, there is only the inside. A person's world, the inside or internal view is all that can be known. The rest can only be the object of speculation.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl. E. Weick, in: Barry M. Staw, Gerald R. Salancik (eds.) New directions in organizational behavior, St. Clair Press, 1977, p. 273
1970s

“What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 10 (p. 106)

“An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 8

“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 66

Related topics