44 Notable Quotes By Rollo May, The Father Of American Existential Psychotherapy

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

  

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

  

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

  

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

  

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.

Culture , Me

  

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. (p. 21)

Relationship

  

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

  

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

Experience

  

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

  

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

  

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

  

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

Like

  

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Experience

  

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

  

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

  

It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings." (p. 16-17)

  

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Relationship

  

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love o fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

Like

  

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

  

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

  

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

  

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

  

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

Culture

  

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

  

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

  

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...

  

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

  

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

Life

  

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

  

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

  

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

Me

  

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.

Experience

  

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.

Life

  

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

Yourself

  

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

  

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.

Life

  

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

  

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

Never

  

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.

  

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?

  

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.

Relationship

  

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.

  

Terapinin amacı uyumdur demek, teraistin, toplumun psiÅŸik polisi olması demektir; bu role mesela ben ÅŸiddetle karşı çıkıyorum