Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation.
~ Rollo May
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Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
~ Rollo May
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Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.
~ Rollo May
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Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
~ Rollo May
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When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
~ Rollo May
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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.
~ Rollo May
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The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.
~ Rollo May
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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May
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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
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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.
~ Rollo May
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