Rollo May quotes - page 2

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)
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings. View quote
Rollo May
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible. View quote
Rollo May
Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness. View quote
Rollo May
Vanity and narcissism - the compulsive need to be admired and praised - undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own. View quote
Rollo May
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. View quote
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. View quote
Rollo May
Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. View quote
Rollo May
To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. View quote
Rollo May
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 forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. View quote
Rollo May
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)
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. View quote
Rollo May
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!”. View quote
Rollo May
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. View quote
Rollo May
True religion, namely a fundamental affirmation of the meaning of life, is something without which no human being can be healthy in personality.. . . What happens to mental health when this meaning which religion gives is absent? In other words, what is the effect of atheism on personality?. . . I have been startled by the fact that practically every genuine atheist with whom I have dealt has exhibited unmistakable neurotic tendencies. View quote
Rollo May
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing. View quote
Rollo May
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. View quote
Rollo May
Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. View quote
Rollo May
Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" View quote
Rollo May
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. View quote
Rollo May
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)
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. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May