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Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Used
Human
Complexity
Humans
Phenomenon
Much
Complexes
Complex
Called
Purpose
Power

More quotes by Rollo May

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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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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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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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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)
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The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.
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Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
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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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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.
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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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By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
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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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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
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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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One does not become fully human painlessly.
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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.
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Freedom does not come automatically it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound it must be achieved each day.
Rollo May
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Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own
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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.
Rollo May