Rollo Quotes

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

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom. ~ Rollo May

Joy is the effect which comes when we use our powers. ~ Rollo May

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. ~ Rollo May

Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness. ~ Rollo Tomassi

To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. ~ Rollo May

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) ~ 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

Forge in the smithy of your soul. ~ Rollo May

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. ~ Rollo May

Creativity occurs as an act of encounter, and is to be understood with this encounter at the center. ~ Rollo May

But are we not at the point where we can no longer make the distinction between normal and neurotic? Do we not all have these conflicts, in greater or lesser degree? And do not all conflicts move into contradiction at some point? When all is said and done, all anxiety arises from conflicts, with its origin in the conflict between being and nonbeing, between one's existence and that which threatens it. All of us, no matter how 'neurotic' or 'normal,' experience the gap between our expectations and reality. This distinction becomes less important, and I believe we must look at all anxiety, preferably without special labels, as part of the human condition. ~ Rollo May

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience. ~ Rollo May

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

The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality. ~ 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

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. ~ Rollo May

It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. ~ 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

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

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. ~ Rollo May

They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean. ~ Rollo May

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." ... this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not. ~ 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

Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world. ~ Rollo May

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death. ~ Rollo May

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

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

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100) ~ Rollo May

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

We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment. ~ Rollo May

Where there is 'freedom from' without corresponding interrelationship, there is the anxiety of the defiant and isolated individual. Where there is dependence without freedom, there is the anxiety of the clinging person who cannot live outside a symbiosis. ~ Rollo May

He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh-deep in the creek, ax swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy's escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel-loosening fear, began to drop their weapons. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The "Relationships are work" meme is a feminine Social Convention. How often do you hear men say these words? This convention has filtered into popular consciousness even amongst men now. For the LTR men who subscribe to this I'd also speculate that many of them are in relationships where they are "doing the work" for the women who are giving them the 'grade' so to speak. And of the single men who subscribe to this mythology, each had to be conditioned to believe this is the case in LTRs by women. ~ Rollo Tomassi

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself. ~ Rollo May

But there comes a point (and this is the challenge facing modern technological Western man) when the cult of technique destroys feeling, undermines passion, and blots out individual identity. The technologically efficient lover ... has lost the power to be carried away; he knows only too well what he is doing. At this point, technology diminishes consciousness and demolishes eros. Tools are no longer an enlargement of consciousness but a substitute for it and, indeed, tend to repress and truncate it. ~ 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

Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society Socrates , Christ , Freud , all the way down the line. ~ Rollo May

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. ~ Rollo May

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. ~ Rollo May

The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. ~ 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

What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings. ~ Rollo May

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

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

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life. ~ Rollo May

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. ~ Rollo May

We receive love roughly in proportion to our capacity to love. ~ Rollo May

Nothing is as simultaneously fear inspiring and arousing for women as a Man she suspects is self-aware of his own value. ~ Rollo Tomassi

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence. ~ 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

Physical courage in whatever scene ... seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself. ~ 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

Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn't want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn't feel so good today. ~ Rollo Romig

Public holoCans yapping and barking the dog language of distraction. All stirred and boiled together to make a thick soup of noise and shadowy light. Rollo ~ Pierce Brown

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

No one can separate themselves from one's social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community. ~ Rollo May

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about. ~ 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

We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one ... is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. ~ Rollo May

One might have thought you had never met my aunt Georgiana," said Rollo, with the steeliness of despair. "She is the one with the false curls and glowing eyes and smoke rising from her jaws. Do not you recollect her?"
"She did strike me as possessing unusual force of character," admitted Damerell. ~ Zen Cho

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

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

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat. ~ Rollo May

What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extend that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relations to the inarticulate, or, if you will, 'unconscious' levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world. (pg 52) ~ Rollo May

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

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: "There's no danger."
"No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
"Slothrop's knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!"
"The whole thing's falling apart, Pointsman!"
"Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there've been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys - "
"That's the P.M.'s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!"
"We've already begun to run into a deficit - "
"Funding," IF you can keep your head, "is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being 'knocked out,' is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal '46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head."
"Your Interested Parties again?" sez Rollo Groast.
"Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted ~ Thomas Pynchon

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

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. ~ Rollo May

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel. ~ Rollo May

Rollo the Walker. Who are you?"
"Dak," he answered. It seemed like Rollo expected more. "Uh, Dak the, er ... Cheese Eater? ~ Carrie Ryan

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history. ~ 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

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible. ~ Rollo May

Every touchy-feely therapist will tell you to open up and express yourself, but all that leads to is the negotiation of desire and the disingenuous obligations based on those terms. ~ Rollo Tomassi

It's really good to have so distinctive a name as an actress. No one ever forgets it. My sister and brother are called Perdita and Rollo. Actually, my family calls me 'Hollyhocks.' ~ Honeysuckle Weeks

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them. ~ Rollo May

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

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. ~ 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

One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment. ~ Rollo May

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Rollo May

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. ~ Rollo May

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as "given" to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a "creative person," but only of a creative act. ~ 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

When you two go out walking, do you like to have the people on the street say, 'Look at these nice twins'?" Immediately the little girl exclaimed, "No, I want them to say, 'Look at these two different people!'" This spontaneous exclamation, obviously revealing something very important to the little girl, cannot be explained by saying that the child wanted attention; for she would have gotten more attention if she had dressed as a twin. It shows, rather, her demand to be a person in her own right, to have personal identity - a need which was more important to her even than attention or prestige. ~ Rollo May

Gentlemen, as I'm fond of saying, women will fuck. They may not fuck you, they may not fuck me, but they will fuck someone. ~ Rollo Tomassi

Something is born, comes into being, something which did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get. ~ Rollo May

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods. ~ 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

I'm just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me. ~ Rollo May

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

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change. ~ Rollo May

You do not buy into a good marriage or LTR, you create one, you build one. ~ Rollo Tomassi

In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being "caught," "overwhelmed"; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague. ~ Rollo May

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