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Rollo May Quotes

d. 1994 United States

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.

United States
Psychologists

Also known as: May, Rollo

Random Rollo May quote

118 quotes

You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.

The Courage to Create (1975)

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

Love and Will (1969)

The awareness of the relationship between the self and the world is precisely what breaks down in anxiety.

The Meaning of Anxiety (1977)

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

The Courage to Create (1975)

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

The Courage to Create (1975)

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

The Courage to Create (1975)

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

Power and Innocence (1972)

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967)

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face.

Freedom and Destiny (1981)

The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.

Existence (1958)

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness.

Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality.

The Meaning of Anxiety (1977)

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Love and Will (1969)

One cannot fight what one does not know.

The Meaning of Anxiety (1977)

The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity.

The Courage to Create (1975)

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.

Love and Will (1969)

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.

Love and Will (1969)

This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day.

Power and Innocence (1972)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rollo May (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.