Quote

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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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Humans
Essential
Confrontation
Anxiety
Sensitivity
Essentials
Preserve
Necessary
Preserves
Conditions
Boredom
Worry
Tension
Sharpen
Existence
Condition
Relieve
Human
Presence
Assure

More quotes by 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.
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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
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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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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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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
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It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
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The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
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We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
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We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
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All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
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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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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before
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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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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