Quotes from Rollo May

there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound up 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.

The Creative Artist and the poet and saint must fight the actual gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success and exploitative power.

In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. "Present dangers are less than future imaginings," as Shakespeare puts it; and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not.

In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, "If I could not support my family, I'd as soon jump off the dock." That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead.

This is what anxiety does to the human being: it disorients him, wiping out temporarily his clear knowledge of what and who he is, and blurring his view of reality around him.

Neurotic anxiety is nature's way, as it were, of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem.

anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out our existence as a self on the other.

Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.

The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

one grows not only by being one's self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary if we are to move toward self-realization.

Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier.

In our particular world in which conformity is the great destroyer of selfhood—in our society in which fitting the "pattern" tends to be accepted as the norm, and being "well liked" is the alleged ticket to salvation—what needs to be emphasized is not only the admitted fact that we are to some extent created by each other but also our capacity to experience, and create, ourselves.

When a culture is caught in the profound convulsions of a transitional period, the individuals in the society understandably suffer spiritual and emotional upheaval; and finding that the accepted mores and ways of thought no longer yield security, they tend to sink into dogmatism and conformism, giving up awareness, or are forced to strive for a heightened self-consciousness by which to become aware of their existence with new conviction and on new bases.

But in another respect man is very different from the rest of nature. He possesses consciousness of himself; his sense of personal identity distinguishes him from the rest of the living or nonliving things. And nature cares not a fig for man's personal

On a more everyday level, our point is simply that when a person feels himself inwardly empty, as is the case with so many modern people, he experiences nature around him also as empty, dried up, dead. The two experiences of emptiness are two sides of the same state of impoverished relation to life.

Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language…Our common human language is not…something to do with vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form.

Among the works of man,

Neurosis may be called a negating of possibilities; it is the shrinking up of one's world. The development of the self is this radically curtailed.

The fear of being alone derives much of its terror from our anxiety lest we lose our awareness of ourselves. If people contemplate being alone for longish periods of time, without anyone to talk to or any radio to eject noise into the air, they generally are afraid that they would be at "loose ends," would lose the boundaries for themselves, would have nothing to bump up against, nothing by which to orient themselves.

Or if, as in the majority of cases in the present day, the parents themselves are anxious and bewildered in the tumultuous seas of the changing times, unsure of themselves and beset by self-doubts, their anxiety will carry over and lead the child to feel that he lives in a world in which it is dangerous to venture into becoming one's self.

Kendini adama ve ?üphe aras?ndaki ili?ki hiçbir ?ekilde ula??lmaz de?ildir. Kendini adama ?üphe içermedi?i zaman de?il, ?üpheye ra?men oldu?unda en sa?l?kl?d?r.

It is interesting that they sometimes say that if they were alone for long they wouldn't be able to work or play in order to get tired; and so they wouldn't be able to sleep.

Kavray??, bilinçli emekten ba??ms?zd?r, eme?in bilinçd???nda kalan k?sm? istirahat sonras?nda bilince ç?kan biçimi haz?rlam??t?r.