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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.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Doubt
Safer
Moving
Doubts
Men
Infinitely
Uncertainty
Spite
Ahead
Courage
Move

More quotes by Rollo May

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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
Rollo May
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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.
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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Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
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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Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
Rollo May
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Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved.
Rollo May
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A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.
Rollo May
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
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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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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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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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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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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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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In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
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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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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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