Quotes from Rollo May

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.

Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.

Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

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.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.

The turtle only makes progress when it's neck is stuck out.

Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

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.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.

In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.

One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment.

Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.

The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life's predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.

Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.