Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
Rollo MayRead
Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
Interpretation
Freedom allows for endless possibilities but carries inherent risks.
In this quote, Rollo May emphasizes that true freedom is not just about the absence of constraints but encompasses the potential and choices that come with it. This flexibility opens up a realm of opportunities that can be both alluring and perilous, as the freedom to choose also encompasses the risk of making unwise decisions.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of personal choices in life.
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.
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.
I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim.
Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.
When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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