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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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
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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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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
~ Rollo May
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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 her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non.
~ Rollo May
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Art is a substitute for violence.
~ Rollo May
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The same impulses that drive persons to violence — the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all — drive the artist to create.
~ Rollo May
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