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Portrait of Rollo May

Rollo May

(1909–1994) Psychotherapist United States

259 quotes in 1055 categories

Rollo May says true freedom appears when we pause between a stimulus and our response, choosing what to do. He links joy to using our powers and warns that intimacy needs courage because risk cannot be avoided. He also notes that technology can arrange the world so we stop truly experiencing it.

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Rollo May was a psychotherapist from the United States, best known for Man's search for himself.

Quick Facts About Rollo May

Born: April 21, 1909
Died: October 22, 1994
Nationality: United States
Profession: Psychotherapist
Notable works: Man's search for himself

About Rollo May

He was linked to humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy, and together with Viktor Frankl he helped develop existential psychotherapy. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a close friend who greatly influenced his ideas.

Awards & Honors

Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

Quotes by Rollo May

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

Actualization

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Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

Change

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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

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Creativity is a yearning for immortality

Creativity

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Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Destiny

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

Inspirational

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Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Depression

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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

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Human dignity is based upon freedom, and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the other.

Dignity

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Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our…

Fear

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The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or…

Age

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

Heart

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Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

Beauty

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

Dilemma

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Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.

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There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when…

Creation

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Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros,…

Care

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I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being - a reaching…

Consciousness

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Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.

Dreams

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All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Art

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

Ancient

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Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then…

Consciousness

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There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and…

Energy

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“so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of…

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Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud…

Analysis

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When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant…

Being in love

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The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He…

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Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering…

Attitude

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The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping…

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When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the…

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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical…

Actualization

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“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the…

Anxiety

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“What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus in the…

Art

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“comes from the Greek word diabolos ; "diabolic" is the term in contemporary English. Diabolos , interestingly enough, literally means "to tear…

Good and evil

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“Eros is the drive for union and reproduction in the biological realm. Even in the birds and animals, we see the "desire…

Change

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“For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question,…

Death

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“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces…

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“This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest…

Life

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This is hard for parents to say genuinely.

Child

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Rollo May by topic

Creativity (37) Love (34) Humans (32) Courage (31) Life (28) Freedom (25) People (22) Anxiety (22) Inspirational (20) Existential (18) Time (16) World (15) Self (15) Men (14) Creative (14) Art (14) Consciousness (13)