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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Rollo May
Image
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
Rollo May
Image
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
Rollo May
Image
Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
Rollo May
Image
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
Rollo May
Image
Creativity is a yearning for immortality
Rollo May
Image
It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.
Rollo May
Image
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
Rollo May
Image
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
Rollo May
Image
That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.
Rollo May
Image
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Rollo May
Image
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May