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Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Forms
Built
Righting
Courage
Wrongs
Creative
Contrast
Moral
Discovering
Society
Whereas
Form
Symbols
Patterns

More quotes by Rollo May

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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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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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Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.
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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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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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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Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.
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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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
Rollo May
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
Rollo May
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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
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.
Rollo May
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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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.
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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Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
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.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May