Rollo May Quotes & Sayings

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. — Rollo May

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message. — Rollo May

Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims ... That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy. — Rollo May

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression. — Rollo May

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

Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved. — Rollo May

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter. — Rollo May

It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect ... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation. — Rollo May

But when his parents consciously or unconsciously exploit him for their own ends or pleasure, or hate or reject him, so that he cannot be sure of minimal support when he tries out his new independence, the child will cling to the parents and will use his capacity for independence only in the forms of negativity and stubbornness. If, when he first begins tentatively to say "No," his parents beat him down rather than love and encourage him, he thereafter will say "No" not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion. — Rollo May

Thus it may be said that the symptoms are often ways of containing the anxiety; they are the anxiety in structuralized form. Freud rightly remarks about psychological symptoms: "The symptom is bound anxiety," or, in other words, anxiety which has been crystallized into an ulcer or heart palpitations or some other symptom. — Rollo May

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

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

Depression is the inability to construct a future. — Rollo May

In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents. — Rollo May

Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss ... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication. — Rollo May

I believe it could be shown in researches - which obviously cannot be gone into here - that when a culture is in its historical phase of growing toward unity, its language reflects the unity and power; whereas when a culture is in the process of change, dispersal and disintegration, the language likewise loses its power. "When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen," said Goethe, referring not only to the fact that the ideals of his nation were then moving toward unity and power, but that the language, which was his vehicle of power as a writer, was also in that stage. In our day the study of semantics is of considerable value, to be sure, and is to be commended. But the disturbing question is why we have to talk so much about what words mean that, once we have learned each other's language, we have little time or energy left for communicating. — Rollo May

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world. — Rollo May

Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another. — Rollo May

Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged. — Rollo May

What is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected. — Rollo May

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 — Rollo May

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety. — Rollo May

The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence. — Rollo May

The creative process must be explored ... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. — Rollo May

Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. — Rollo May

The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. — Rollo May

When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects ... Love is the answer, we sing ... our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros. — Rollo May

Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. — Rollo May

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. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters. — Rollo May

Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it. — Rollo May

Much self-condemnation, thus, 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'. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, 'Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat'. — Rollo May

It would seem that the affects, biological needs, and forms of behavior most repressed in a given culture are the ones most likely to give rise to symptoms . [ ... ]
in our culture it is considered much more acceptable to have an organic illness than an emotional or mental disorder; this would influence the fact that anxiety and other emotional stresses in our culture so often take a somatic form. In short, the culture conditions the way a person tries to resolve his anxiety, and specifically what symptoms he may employ. — Rollo May

The "stuffed men" are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they "lean together"; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love. — Rollo May

The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the 'core' or 'essence' of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth - all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened. — Rollo May

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. — Rollo May

Thus, constriction and impoverishment of personality make it possible to avoid subjective conflict and concomitant anxiety. But the person's freedom, originality, capacity for independent love, as well as his other possibilities for expansion and development as an autonomous personality are renounced in the same process. By accepting impoverishment of personality, one can buy temporary freedom from anxiety, to be sure. But the price for this 'bargain' is the loss of those unique and most precious characteristics of the human self. — Rollo May

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning. — Rollo May

The fear of being alone derives much of its terror from our anxiety lest we lose our awareness of ourselves. If people contemplate being alone for longish periods of time, without anyone to talk to or any radio to eject noise into the air, they generally are afraid that they would be at "loose ends," would lose the boundaries for themselves, would have nothing to bump up against, nothing by which to orient themselves. — Rollo May

Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power. — Rollo May

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. — Rollo May

It is interesting that they sometimes say that if they were alone for long they wouldn't be able to work or play in order to get tired; and so they wouldn't be able to sleep. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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

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

The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. — Rollo May

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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 one's identity as a being of worth and dignity. — Rollo May

Myth safeguards and enforces morality, as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality. — Rollo May

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings. — Rollo May

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way. — Rollo May

In this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself or himself to every experience, that he or she cannot separate him-or herself enough from anxiety to comprehend the goal of avoidance of, or freedom from, anxiety. What Nancy sought was to be able to step cautiously from rock to rock without falling; the idea or possibility of not being on a precipice at all did not occur to her. — Rollo May

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

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man. — Rollo May

Where rejection is present with neurotic anxiety, we found a certain constellation always present: The rejection was never accepted as an objective fact, but was held in juxtaposition with idealized expectations about the parent. The young woman was unable to appraise the parent realistically, but always confused the reality situation with expectations of what the parent should have been or might yet become. — Rollo May

For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? ... The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back? ...
This ... has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be //sure// God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security. — Rollo May

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue. — Rollo May

One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism. — Rollo May

One does not become fully human painlessly. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

The significant question is whether the activity pursued permits the release of tension without resolving the underlying conflict. If so, the conflict still remains, and hence the activity must be engaged in repeatedly. We then may have the beginning of compulsion neurosis. — Rollo May

In all summaries, the problems seem simpler than they actually are. In the following conclusions, anxiety may sound again like an abnormal condition affecting only unfortunate individuals. I would like to emphasize again that anxiety is a life-long challenge. The tradegy of Brown is that his anxiety, which was severe enough at times to remove almost all possibilities from his existence, is mainly destructive and paralyzingly rather than challenging and enlivening. I hope the reader will keep in mind the essential humanness of anxiety. — Rollo May

The turtle only makes progress when it's neck is stuck out. — Rollo May

Creative people ... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. — Rollo May

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. — Rollo May

Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness. — Rollo May

Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, "If I could not support my family, I'd as soon jump off the dock." That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead. — Rollo May

Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded. — Rollo May

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. — Rollo May

Man, furthermore, must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one's consciousness of one's self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one's self is always a unique act - I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals. — Rollo May

Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that "elegance" - as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries - is a key to ultimate reality? — Rollo May

Some psychologists and philosophers are distrustful of the concept of self. They argue against it because they do not like separating man from the continuum with animals, and they believe the concept of the self gets in the way of scientific experimentation. But rejecting the concept of "self" as "unscientific" because it cannot be reduced to mathematical equations is roughly the same as the argument two and three decades ago that Freud's theories and the concept of "unconscious" motivation were "unscientific." It is a defensive and dogmatic science - and therefore not true science - which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don't fit. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

Self-love is not only necessary and good, it is a prerequisite for loving others. — Rollo May

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. — Rollo May

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are. — Rollo May

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 — Rollo May

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it. — Rollo May

The anxiety prevalent in our day and the succession of economic and political catastrophes our world has been going through are both symptoms of the same underlying cause, namely the traumatic changes occurring in Western society. Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, for example, do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer. — Rollo May

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

Sisyphus,' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher,' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny. — Rollo May

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

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

The personal freedom to think & feel & speak authentically & to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human. — Rollo May

Whether we are 'Freudians' or not, as I am not, we are surely all post-Freudian. He set the tone for vast changes in our culture — Rollo May