Rollo May quotes

Rollo May was an influential American existential psychologist and author. His work explored the complexities of anxiety, freedom, and the human experience. He is remembered for his significant contributions to existential psychotherapy and for shaping modern approaches to understanding the self. Here are 167 of his quotes:

Depression is the inability to construct a future. (Rollo May)
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about. View quote
Rollo May
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
One does not become fully human painlessly. View quote
Rollo May
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. View quote
Rollo May
Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. View quote
Rollo May
This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity. View quote
Rollo May
The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized - and it may explode into violence. View quote
Rollo May
It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings. View quote
Rollo May
When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." ... this 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)
When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis. View quote
Rollo May
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. View quote
Rollo May
A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat. View quote
Rollo May
Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within. View quote
Rollo May
Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself. View quote
Rollo May
When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged. (Rollo May)
Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union. View quote
Rollo May
There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no." View quote
Rollo May
It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love. View quote
Rollo May
Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. View quote
Rollo May