Quote

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

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
Necessary
Courage
Becoming
Possible
Make

More quotes by 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
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
Rollo May
Image
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
Image
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
Image
They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
Rollo May
Image
The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Rollo May
Image
Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.
Rollo May
Image
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.
Rollo May
Image
Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
Rollo May
Image
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Rollo May
Image
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
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.
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
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
Image
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
Rollo May
Image
Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.
Rollo May