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
Culture
Definition
Contemporary
Definitions
Impoverishment
Myth
Existentialism
Popular
Profoundly
Proof
Existential
Stronger
Falsehood
Though
Mistaken

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Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious.
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Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
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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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It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
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It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings. (p. 16-17)
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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
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Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.
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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)
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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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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Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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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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By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
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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.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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