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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
Affect
Requires
Courage
Relationship
Risk
Actualization
Cannot
Outset
Inescapable
Intimacy

More quotes by Rollo May

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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
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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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If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
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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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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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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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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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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
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Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
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We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love.
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
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We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.
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There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.
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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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Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
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Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.
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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