Quote

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

Rollo May

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Rollo May

Image
The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
Rollo May
Image
Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
Rollo May
Image
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
Image
We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
Rollo May
Image
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)
Rollo May
Image
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
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
Rollo May
Image
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
Image
Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.
Rollo May
Image
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
Rollo May
Image
It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings. (p. 16-17)
Rollo May
Image
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