Top 15 Rollo May Quotes

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

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.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

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.

"Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves."

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. (p. 21)

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)

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

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

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

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Creative people, as I see them, 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 the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.