Rollo May quotes

In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.

Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.

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

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.

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 frightened at the prospect of being alone.

Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.

The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

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

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.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.

I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.

Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

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 frightened at the prospect of being alone.

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.

Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.

Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.

It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.