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Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Neither
Neurosis
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Encounter
Creativity
Courageous
Courage
Encounters
Talent
Gods
Simple
Simplicity
Intense
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More quotes by Rollo May

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Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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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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If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
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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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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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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
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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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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.
Rollo May
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There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.
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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before
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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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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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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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That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.
Rollo May
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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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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.
Rollo May
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It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.
Rollo May