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Rollo May Quotes (1909-1994)
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About Rollo May
Rollo Reece May (21 April 1909 – 22 October 1994) was an American humanistic and existential psychologist, authoring the influential books Psychology and the Human Dilemma and Love and Will along with several other volumes explaining and expanding on his theories.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Rollo May quotes.
“One does not become fully human painlessly.”
“There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no."”
“Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”
“[D]epression… can be usefully seen, from one point of view, as the inability to see or construct a future.”
“You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.”
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
“When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.”
“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.”
“Physical courage in whatever scene … seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself.”
“Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.”
“The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.”
“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.”
“It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings.”
“However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.”
“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.”
“Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.”
“The practical implicati´on is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.”
Rollo May Quotes by Topic
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Rollo May on Courage 5 quotes
“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 on Invention 4 quotes
“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.”
Rollo May on Anxiety 3 quotes
“One cannot fight what one does not know.”
Rollo May on Love 3 quotes
“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.”
Rollo May on Daimonic 2 quotes
“The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. … Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.”
Rollo May on Religion 2 quotes
“In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.”
Rollo May on Psychotherapy 2 quotes
“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”
Rollo May on Control 2 quotes
“Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.”
Rollo May on Depression
“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
Rollo May on Evil
Rollo May on Life
Rollo May on Freedom
“Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”
What Rollo May Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Rollo May shared regarding contemporaries.
Rollo May on Aeschylus
“Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Rollo May
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
About Rollo May
Rollo Reece May (21 April 1909 – 22 October 1994) was an American humanistic and existential psychologist, authoring the influential books Psychology and the Human Dilemma and Love and Will along with several other volumes explaining and expanding on his theories.