Quotes from Rollo May

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. (p. 21)

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

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

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings." (p. 16-17)

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

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

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

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

when men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.