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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Force
Mean
Pursue
Purpose

More quotes by Rollo May

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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
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Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact.
Rollo May
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
Rollo May
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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
Rollo May
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Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
Rollo May
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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
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The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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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
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Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.
Rollo May
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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
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The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
Rollo May
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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
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Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.
Rollo May
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It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings. (p. 16-17)
Rollo May
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Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.
Rollo May
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That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.
Rollo May