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
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
Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
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
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
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
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.
Rollo May
Image
It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
Rollo May
Image
When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
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
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
Image
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
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
One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May
Image
Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
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
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.
Rollo May
Image
Humor is the healthy way of feeling distance between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.
Rollo May
Image
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