Rollo May Quotes

so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of how the action is accepted. It is as though one had always to postpone his judgment until he looked at his audience. The person who is passive, to whom or for whom the act is done, has the power to make the act effective or ineffective, rather than the one who is doing it. Thus we tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as selves.

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the “whole man.” When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: “Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?

Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one’s self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man’s self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. “All man’s history,” he proclaimed, “is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness.

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.

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons.

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.

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

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.

When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.

Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.

Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.

If, when he first begins tentatively to say “No,” his parents beat him down rather than love and encourage him, he thereafter will say “No” not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion.

"Much self-condemnation is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark "One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man.

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.