Quotes from Rollo May

Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.

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.

In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.

Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of ones identity as being of worth and dignity.

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

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.

Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.

Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow to move ahead.

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.

If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.

Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.