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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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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Humans
Later
Freedom
History
Also
Change
Authentic
Doe
Sooner
Character
Affect
Human
Inner

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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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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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There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.
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Creativity is a yearning for immortality
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Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
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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.
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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.
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Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.
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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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The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.
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Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
Rollo May