Quote

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Inescapable
Intimacy
Affect
Requires
Courage
Relationship
Risk
Actualization
Cannot
Outset

More quotes by Rollo May

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Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
Rollo May
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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
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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.
Rollo May
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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
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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.
Rollo May
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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
Rollo May
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Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.
Rollo May
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
Rollo May
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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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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May
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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.
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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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Rollo May
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
Rollo May
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Care is a state in which something does matter care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.
Rollo May
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Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
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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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
Rollo May
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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.
Rollo May