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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Means
Grief
Wells
Sorrow
Well
Negative
Mean
Positive
Love
Consciousness
Life
Joy
Intensity
Open
Fulfillment
Possible
Disappointment

More quotes by 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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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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The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
Rollo May
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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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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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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Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own
Rollo May
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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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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.
Rollo May
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May
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The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
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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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
Rollo May
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We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
Rollo May
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The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning heart. Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
Rollo May
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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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