Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy. Rollo May More Quotes by Rollo May More Quotes From Rollo May The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. Rollo May moments reality firsts We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being. Rollo May sequels creating creativity The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line. Rollo May lines poet lovers Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76) Rollo May anxiety creative artist All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world. Rollo May artist feelings meaningful It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation. Rollo May creativity artist moving We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. Rollo May inspirational people commitment The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment. Rollo May becoming technology spiritual Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. Rollo May like-love courage reality When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship. Rollo May existentialism humans reality In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents. Rollo May sycophants status-quo dissent The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe. Rollo May sunrise views heart 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. Rollo May quality speak thinking Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience. Rollo May self character men Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology . Rollo May understanding humanity men Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods. Rollo May creativity simple courage Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. Rollo May apathy running long 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 Rollo May funny-relationship love life Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety. Rollo May anxiety community responsibility It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness. Rollo May practice may people
