Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
Rollo MayRead
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)
Interpretation
Human freedom allows us to consciously choose our responses rather than react automatically.
Rollo May emphasizes that true human freedom lies in our ability to take a moment of reflection between an external stimulus and our reaction. This pause empowers us to make deliberate choices that shape our identity and self-awareness, highlighting the intertwined nature of freedom, consciousness, and personal agency.
In practice
In a workshop about personal development, this quote could be used to illustrate the importance of mindful decision-making.
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.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
In Christian engagement, the goal is to win the person _x000D_ who is of the other worldview - not to destroy the person.
Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it . . . holy if only . . . we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.
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