Rollo Reece May (April 21, 1909 - October 22, 1994) was an American existential psychologist. He was the author of the influential book Love and Will, and is often associated with both humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy. He was a major proponent of "existential psychotherapy," which seeks to analyze the structure of human existence with the aim of understanding the reality underlying all situations of humans in crises. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
Art is a substitute for violence.
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.
Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, 'This is me and the world be damned!'
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.
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 an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.
o 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.
Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
Physical courage in whatever scene... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.
Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary.
The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine.
The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
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.
There is no meaningful 'yes' unless the individual could also have said 'no.'
There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
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.
When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Rollo May
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