Quote

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Myth
Existentialism
Popular
Profoundly
Proof
Existential
Stronger
Falsehood
Though
Mistaken
Culture
Definition
Contemporary
Definitions
Impoverishment

More quotes by Rollo May

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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
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Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Creativity is a yearning for immortality
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Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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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.
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There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
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When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
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Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved.
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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
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The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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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.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.
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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