Quote

Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious.

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
Technique
Protection
Mechanisms
Easily
Extension
Tools
Extensions
Consciousness
Defence
Ought
Techniques
Become
Mechanism
Unconscious

More quotes by Rollo May

Image
They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
Rollo May
Image
Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
Rollo May
Image
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Rollo May
Image
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
Rollo May
Image
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
Rollo May
Image
I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
Rollo May
Image
Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
Rollo May
Image
All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.
Rollo May
Image
It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings. (p. 16-17)
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
Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
Rollo May
Image
It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
Rollo May
Image
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
Image
Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May
Image
We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
Rollo May
Image
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.
Rollo May