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

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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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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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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.
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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
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Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
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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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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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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.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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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 may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.
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In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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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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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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Humor is the healthy way of feeling distance between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.
Rollo May