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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

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Unconscious
Technique
Mechanisms
Protection
Extension
Easily
Extensions
Tools
Defence
Consciousness
Techniques
Ought
Become
Mechanism

More quotes by Rollo May

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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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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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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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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.
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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
Rollo May
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One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May
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Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.
Rollo May
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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
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In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Rollo May
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Love is generally confused with dependence but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
Rollo May
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Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
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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.
Rollo May
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One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
Rollo May
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
Rollo May
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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
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However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Rollo May
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Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.
Rollo May
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It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
Rollo May
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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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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.
Rollo May