Top 200 Rollo May Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man.”

— Rollo May

102. “A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.”

— Rollo May

103. “It takes a strong self – that is, a strong sense of personal identity – to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up.”

— Rollo May

104. “No one can separate themselves from one’s social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community.”

— Rollo May

105. “I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”

— Rollo May

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”

— Rollo May

111. “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

112. “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

113. “The turtle only makes progress when it’s neck is stuck out.”

— Rollo May

114. “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

115. “When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.”

— Rollo May

116. “The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth – all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened.”

— Rollo May

117. “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

118. “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.”

— Rollo May

119. “One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.”

— Rollo May

120. “Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.”

— Rollo May

121. “Creativity is a yearning for immortality.”

— Rollo May

122. “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

123. “Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.”

— Rollo May

124. “Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.”

— Rollo May

125. “A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.”

— Rollo May

126. “When people feel threatened and anxious they become more rigid, and when in doubt they tend to become dogmatic; and then they lose their own vitality. They use the remnants of traditional values to build a protective encasement and then shrink behind it; or they make an outright panicky retreat into the past. But.”

— Rollo May

127. “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”

— Rollo May

128. “Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.”

— Rollo May

129. “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

130. “Creativity occurs as an act of encounter, and is to be understood with this encounter at the center.”

— Rollo May

131. “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!”

— Rollo May

132. “What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.”

— Rollo May

133. “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.”

— Rollo May

134. “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

135. “The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.”

— Rollo May

136. “Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.”

— Rollo May

137. “Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.”

— Rollo May

138. “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

139. “The “stuffed men” are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they “lean together”; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.”

— Rollo May

140. “It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to be naked psychologically or spiritually – easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experienced as making us more vulnerable.”

— Rollo May

141. “To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.”

— Rollo May

142. “Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one’s self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man’s self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. “All man’s history,” he proclaimed, “is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness.”

— Rollo May

143. “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

144. “If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.”

— Rollo May

145. “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

146. “Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.”

— Rollo May

147. “Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?”

— Rollo May

148. “By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.”

— Rollo May

149. “Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.”

— Rollo May

150. “The line between ‘normal’ and ‘neurotic’ begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive – that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.”

— Rollo May