Rollo May Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

  Rollo May

  Giving, World, Patterns

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

  Rollo May

  Meaningful, Artist, Feelings

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

  5 Copy quote

• Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Moving, Long

  Rollo May Ph.D. (1953). “Man's Search for Himself”

  5 Copy quote

• It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

  Rollo May

  Freedom, Moving, Journey

  Rollo May (2009). “Man's Search for Himself”, p.174, W. W. Norton & Company

  13 Copy quote

• Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

  Rollo May

  Consciousness, Awareness, Possibility

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.114, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.

  Rollo May

  Creativity, Definitions, Born

  "The Courage to Create".

  8 Copy quote

• Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.

  Rollo May

  Risk, Intimacy, Self Actualization

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

  12 Copy quote

• Dogmatism 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 destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

  Rollo May

  Artist, Creative, Anxiety

  8 Copy quote

• Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

  Rollo May

  Passion, Creativity, Childhood

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

  16 Copy quote

• 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." For 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

  Life, Falling In Love, Being In Love

  "Love & Will".

  13 Copy quote

• Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

  Rollo May

  Struggle, Writing, Creativity

  Rollo May (2011). “Love & Will”, p.320, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

  Rollo May

  Self, Wish, Weight

  6 Copy quote

• A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

  Rollo May

  Perspective, Historical, Facts

  4 Copy quote

• The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

  Rollo May

  Lines, Lovers, Poet

  4 Copy quote

• We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.

  Rollo May

  Love, Capacity To Love, Capacity

  "Man's Search for Himself".

  4 Copy quote

• The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.

  Rollo May

  Sex, Creative, Example

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

  9 Copy quote

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

  Rollo May

  Wish, Weight, Capacity

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.100, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

  Rollo May

  Powerful, Home, Community

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Data, Order, Giving

  Rollo May (1998). “Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence”, p.237, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such.

  Rollo May

  Lying, Fate, Men

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

  8 Copy quote

• ... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

  Rollo May

  Creativity, Artist, Creating

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.45, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Courage, Responsibility, Decision

  Rollo May (2009). “Man's Search for Himself”, p.173, W. W. Norton & Company

  6 Copy quote

• Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

  Rollo May

  Powerful, Speaks Out, Order

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Phrases, Movement, Starting

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Struggle, Thinking, Hands

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.59, W. W. Norton & Company

  13 Copy quote

Page 6 of 9

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin