Quotes from Rollo May

Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.

When people feel threatened and anxious they become more rigid, and when in doubt they tend to become dogmatic; and then they lose their own vitality. They use the remnants of traditional values to build a protective encasement and then shrink behind it; or they make an outright panicky retreat into the past. But

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.

But in neurotic anxiety, two conditions are necessary: (1) the threat must be to a vital value; and (2) the threat must be present in juxtaposition with another threat so that the individual cannot avoid one threat without being confronted by another. In patterns of neurotic anxiety, the values held essential to the individual's existence as a personality are in contradiction with each other.

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

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

It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before." --

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

This is a time, as Herman Hesse puts it, "when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.

if the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons.

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.

In the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened

Life is not a matter for simple optimism--for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism--for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean's office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age-old capacity to be insurgent.

I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

And it is permissible to want to be alone temporarily to "get away from it all." But if one mentioned at a party that he liked to be alone, not for a rest or an escape, but for its own joys, people would think that something was vaguely wrong with him—that some pariah aura of untouchability or sickness hovered round him. And if a person is alone very much of the time, people tend to think of him as a failure, for it is inconceivable to them that he would choose to be alone.

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing "about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.