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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
Limitations
Limitation
Possibilities
Tension
Awareness
Possibility
Consciousness
Dialectical
Emerges

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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.
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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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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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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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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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Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.
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Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.
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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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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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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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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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Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.
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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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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
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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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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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The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
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Inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
Rollo May