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Creativity is a yearning for immortality

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Yearning
Immortality
Creativity

More quotes by Rollo May

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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.
Rollo May
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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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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Love is generally confused with dependence but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
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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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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
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They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
Rollo May
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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
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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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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
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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.
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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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
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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
Rollo May
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It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts.
Rollo May
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Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.
Rollo May
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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