Quote

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

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Tears
System
Shuts
Evil
Existential
Persons
Barriers
Person
Sets
People
Ethics
Raises
Apart

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Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
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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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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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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
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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.
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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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The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
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Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.
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Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
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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)
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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.
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Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.
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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.
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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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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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