Quotes from Rollo May

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

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.

There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

I'm just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.

I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

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 very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from "the fear of finding oneself alone," remarks André Gide, "and so they don't find themselves at all.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

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...

In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.

Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man

Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.

They showed considerable anxiety because they were in the process of loving beauty.

One has to remain detached in order to triumph over others

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the "whole man." When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: "Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but a genuine union.

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

Much self-condemnation is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark "One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man.

Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern man, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being "hollow" and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.