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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

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
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More quotes by Rollo May

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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
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Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
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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
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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.
Rollo May
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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
Rollo May
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Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.
Rollo May
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Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
Rollo May
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Rollo May
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Rollo May
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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
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We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
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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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