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Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Stimulus
Pauses
Response
Choose
Ability
Freedom
Real
Pause

More quotes by Rollo May

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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.
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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.
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Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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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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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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Creativity is a yearning for immortality
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
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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.
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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.
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All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
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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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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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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 infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.
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