"When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility."
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Quote collection
Rollo May quotes (page 8 of 11)
201 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?"
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"Forge in the smithy of your soul."
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"There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history."
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"Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant."
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"Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!"
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"Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways."
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"Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss... they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication."
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"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"
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"Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead."
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"Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another."
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"The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively."
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"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."
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"In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of herd morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period."
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"Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos."
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"It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts."
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"... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities."
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"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. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term "hero" is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man."
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"If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against."
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"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."
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