Rollo May quotes - page 4

The central psychological endeavor of Kierkegaard may be summed up under the heading of the question he pursued relentlessly: How can one become an individual? The individual was being swallowed up on the rational side by Hegel's vast logical "absolute Whole," on the economic side by the increasing objectification of the person, and on the moral and spiritual side by the soft and vapid religion of his day. Europe was ill, and was to become more so, not because knowledge or techniques were lacking but because of the want of passion, commitment. ""Away from Speculation, away from the System," he called, and "back to reality!" (Rollo May)
Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. View quote
Rollo May
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. View quote
Rollo May
I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively. View quote
Rollo May
We could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn't be that cruel in the our civilized twentieth century - the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession. The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us. View quote
Rollo May
This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. View quote
Rollo May
The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. View quote
Rollo May
It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. View quote
Rollo May
Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. View quote
Rollo May
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations. View quote
Rollo May
Civilization begins with a rebellion. (Rollo May)
Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time. View quote
Rollo May
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. View quote
Rollo May
Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. View quote
Rollo May
This may be the particular "neurotic personality of our time” – the neurotic pattern of contemporary "outer directed” organizational man. View quote
Rollo May
Violence is the daimonic gone awry. View quote
Rollo May
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. View quote
Rollo May
What occurs is always a process, a doing - specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world. View quote
Rollo May
If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. View quote
Rollo May
The existential way of understanding human beings has some illustrious progenitors in Western history, such as Socrates in his dialogues, Augustine in his depth-psychological analyses of the self, Pascal in his struggle to find a place for the "heart's reasons which the reason knows not of.”. View quote
Rollo May
Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. (Rollo May)
In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. View quote
Rollo May
Art is a substitute for violence. View quote
Rollo May
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. View quote
Rollo May
Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. View quote
Rollo May