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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Innovation
Express
Creating
Listen
Ideas
Betrayed
Depression
Originals
Original

More quotes by Rollo May

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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.
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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
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Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.
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Love is generally confused with dependence but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Rollo May
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
Rollo May
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Rollo May
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
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It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
Rollo May
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Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
Rollo May
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
Rollo May
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The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.
Rollo May
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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
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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
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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
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In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Rollo May
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
Rollo May
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Freedom does not come automatically it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound it must be achieved each day.
Rollo May
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It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.
Rollo May