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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
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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Humor
Feeling
Looking
Feelings
Problem
Distance
Self
Perspective
Way
Standing
Healthy
More quotes by Rollo May
Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious.
Rollo May
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.
Rollo May
The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
Rollo May
There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
Rollo May
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
Rollo May
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
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
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
Rollo May
Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
Rollo May
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning heart. Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
Rollo May
In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.
Rollo May
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
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.
Rollo May
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
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
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
Rollo May
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
Rollo May
The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
Rollo May
Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.
Rollo May
All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
Rollo May
