One does not become fully human painlessly.
~ Rollo May

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Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way.
~ Rollo May

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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.
~ Rollo May

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Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist.
~ Rollo May

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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.
~ Rollo May

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It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow human beings.
~ Rollo May

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Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
~ Rollo May

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Both artists and neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively.
~ Rollo May

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The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.
~ Rollo May

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