Top 200 Rollo May Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.”

— Rollo May

52. “I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.”

— Rollo May

53. “Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.”

— Rollo May

54. “People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.”

— Rollo May

55. “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

56. “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

57. “A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.”

— Rollo May

58. “There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.”

— Rollo May

59. “The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.”

— Rollo May

60. “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

61. “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

62. “There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.”

— Rollo May

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.”

— Rollo May

67. “If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.”

— Rollo May

68. “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

69. “It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.”

— Rollo May

70. “The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom – namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety-creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community.”

— Rollo May

71. “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

72. “Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.”

— Rollo May

73. “Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.”

— Rollo May

74. “The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”

— Rollo May

75. “Much self-condemnation is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza’s remark “One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man.”

— Rollo May

76. “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

77. “Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza’s remark, ‘One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man’. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, ‘Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat’.”

— Rollo May

78. “When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.”

— Rollo May

79. “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

80. “Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons.”

— Rollo May

81. “Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.”

— Rollo May

82. “One longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment.”

— Rollo May

83. “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

84. “Life is not a matter for simple optimism – for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism – for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.”

— Rollo May

85. “All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.”

— Rollo May

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.”

— Rollo May

90. “In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being “caught,” “overwhelmed”; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague.”

— Rollo May

91. “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.”

— Rollo May

92. “One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.”

— Rollo May

93. “The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”

— Rollo May

94. “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

95. “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

96. “Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.”

— Rollo May

97. “Something is born, comes into being, something which did not exist before – which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.”

— Rollo May

98. “We receive love roughly in proportion to our capacity to love.”

— Rollo May

99. “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.”

— Rollo May

100. “There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.”

— Rollo May