"The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity."
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Rollo May quotes (page 1 of 11)
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"Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."
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"Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves."
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"If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself."
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"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"
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"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."
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"Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing."
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"Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all."
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"Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Depression is the inability to construct a future."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about."
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