Quote

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.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Virtue
Foundation
Values
Mere
Conformism
Reality
Among
Pales
Without
Value
Underlies
Giving
Courage
Dependency
Love
Gives
Fidelity
Like
Personal
Pale
Becomes
Virtues

More quotes by Rollo May

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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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Creativity is a yearning for immortality
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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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.
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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.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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.
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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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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.
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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
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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 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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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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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.
Rollo May
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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)
Rollo May
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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.
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
Rollo May