110+ Rollo May Quotes to Enhance Your Mental Health and Cultivate Self-Awareness

Rollo May was an American existential psychologist and author. He is best known for his books on existential psychology, which include Love and Will and The Courage to Create. He was a major proponent of humanistic psychology, which emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility and the potential for growth and change. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rollo May on love, psychoanalytic, existential.

Top 10 Rollo May Quotes

1. Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
2. Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
3. If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
4. Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self -love is not only necessary and good but that it also is a prerequisite for loving others.
5. Depression is the inability to construct a future.
6. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
7. Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Rollo May Short Quotes

• People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
• One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.
• Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.
• Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
• Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.
• Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.
• There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
• Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
• Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
• Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.

Rollo May Quotes About Love

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love. — Rollo May

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

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. — Rollo May

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. — Rollo May

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever. — 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

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

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union — Rollo May

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

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 — Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes About Existential

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. — Rollo May

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. — Rollo May

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

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man. — Rollo May

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths. — Rollo May

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

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

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies. — Rollo May

Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter. — Rollo May

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other. — Rollo May

Rollo May Quotes About Beings

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

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way. — Rollo May

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings. — Rollo May

Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself. — Rollo May

Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power. — Rollo May

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

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world. — 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

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all. — Rollo May

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

Rollo May Quotes About Capacity

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

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

We receive love — from our children as well as others — not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. — 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

Rollo May Quotes About Experience

The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call. — Rollo May

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy. — Rollo May

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? — Rollo May

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience 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

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers. — 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

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

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

Rollo May Famous Quotes And Sayings

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. — 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

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

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity. — Rollo May

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

Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters. — 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

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. — Rollo May

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. — Rollo May

Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73) — Rollo May

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. — Rollo May

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own. — 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

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

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence. — 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

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

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

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76) — Rollo May

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness. — Rollo May

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination. — Rollo May

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying. — Rollo May

Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious. — Rollo May

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within. — Rollo May

Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. — Rollo May

The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. — 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

We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros. — Rollo May

To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked. — Rollo May

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. — Rollo May

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt. — Rollo May

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human. — Rollo May

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths. — Rollo May

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

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat. — Rollo May

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own — 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

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential. — Rollo May

In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. — Rollo May

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

Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage and wisdom in the society. The hero carries our hopes, our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded. — Rollo May

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

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center. — 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

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

The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. — Rollo May

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. — Rollo May

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

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. — Rollo May

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

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

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

The opposite of courage in our society isn't cowardice, it's conformity. — Rollo May

I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate. — Rollo May

Creativity is a yearning for immortality — Rollo May

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

Life Lessons by Rollo May

Rollo May taught that life is a journey of self-discovery and that courage is the key to unlocking our potential. He argued that by facing our fears and taking risks, we can grow and develop as individuals. He also believed that we must accept responsibility for our own lives and that our choices have consequences.