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
Creativity
Creative
Experience
Cannot
Insights
Give
Dedication
Giving
Intensity
Insight
Commitment

More quotes by Rollo May

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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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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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Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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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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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
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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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The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.
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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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Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.
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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.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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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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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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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.
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We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.
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Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
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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.
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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.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May