Top 200 Rollo May Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.”

— Rollo May

2. “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.”

— Rollo May

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3. “Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.”

— Rollo May

4. “Real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.”

— Rollo May

5. “Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”

— Rollo May

6. “Self-love is not only necessary and good, it is a prerequisite for loving others.”

— Rollo May

7. “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.”

— Rollo May

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Rollo May

10. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

— Rollo May

11. “Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.”

— Rollo May

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

— Rollo May

13. “Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

— Rollo May

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

— Rollo May

15. “Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.”

— Rollo May

16. “What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”

— Rollo May

17. “One does not become fully human painlessly.”

— Rollo May

18. “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

19. “People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.”

— Rollo May

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

— Rollo May

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

— Rollo May

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.”

— Rollo May

25. “The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.”

— Rollo May

26. “We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.”

— Rollo May

27. “The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

— Rollo May

28. “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

29. “Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.”

— Rollo May

30. “Forge in the smithy of your soul.”

— Rollo May

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Rollo May

33. “Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.”

— Rollo May

34. “Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.”

— Rollo May

35. “Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.”

— Rollo May

36. “Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.”

— Rollo May

37. “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.”

— Rollo May

38. “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

39. “Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.”

— Rollo May

40. “We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.”

— Rollo May

41. “Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”

— Rollo May

42. “Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.”

— Rollo May

43. “Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.”

— Rollo May

44. “Joy is the effect which comes when we use our powers.”

— Rollo May

45. “One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.”

— Rollo May

46. “Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.”

— Rollo May

47. “I became a psychotherapist because that’s where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.”

— Rollo May

48. “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

49. “Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.”

— Rollo May

50. “Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.”

— Rollo May