351 Quotes by Rollo May

I became a psychotherapist because that’s where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

The turtle only makes progress when it’s neck is stuck out.

But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is ‘silly,’ and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

And did not Spinoza’s refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?

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.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing “about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.