Daimonic Quotes

When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible. (Rollo May)
Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. View quote
Rollo May
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. View quote
Rollo May
While the daimonic cannot be said to be evil in itself, it confronts us with the troublesome dilemma of whether it is to be used with awareness, a sense of responsibility and the significance of life, or blindly and rashly. View quote
Rollo May
Violence is the daimonic gone awry. It is "demon possession" in its starkest form. 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. 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
Violence is the daimonic gone awry. View quote
Rollo May
The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. View quote
Rollo May
The daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. View quote
Rollo May
All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. View quote
Rollo May
The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. (Rollo May)
The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. View quote
Rollo May
We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic. View quote
Rollo May
The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. View quote
Rollo May
[T]he daimonic power does not merely take the individual over as its victim, but works through him psychologically, it clouds his judgment, makes it harder for him to see reality, but still leaves him with the responsibility for the act. This is the age old dilemma of my own personal responsibility even though I am ruled by fate. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality are psychologized only to a limited extent. Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time. View quote
Rollo May