Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

— Rollo May

Hate is not the opposite of love apathy is.

— Rollo May

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)

— Rollo May

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

— Rollo May

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 problems with perspective.

— Rollo May

If the will remains in protest it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.

— Rollo May

If you do not express your own original ideas if you do not listen to your own being you will have betrayed yourself.

— Rollo May

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

— Rollo May

I'm the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask of what vital value is being threatened

— Rollo May

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

— Rollo May