Quote

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

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Present
Distasteful
Education
Temporarily
Situation
Carries
Within
Carrie
Reality
Avoiding
Better
Anxiety
Even
Source
Always
Teacher
Evade

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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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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.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.
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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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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Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
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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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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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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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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It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
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Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
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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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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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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
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Freedom does not come automatically it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound it must be achieved each day.
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