Quote

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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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Creative
Experience
Cannot
Insights
Give
Dedication
Giving
Intensity
Insight
Commitment
Creativity

More quotes by Rollo May

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All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
Rollo May
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In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Rollo May
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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.
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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One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
Rollo May
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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
Rollo May
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When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
Rollo May
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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.
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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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
Rollo May
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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.
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