Rollo May

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before

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.

Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.

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

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

Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims...That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

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.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

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

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.