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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Possibilities
Tension
Awareness
Possibility
Consciousness
Dialectical
Emerges
Limitations
Limitation

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If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
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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.
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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.
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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
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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.
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
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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.
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By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
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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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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
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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.
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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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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.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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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.
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Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
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Love is generally confused with dependence but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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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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