Rollo May Quotes About Anxiety

Quotes about: Anxiety

• A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

  Rollo May

  Anxiety, Stronger, Threat

  "Psychology and the Human Dilemma". Book by Rollo May, p. 51, 1967.

• What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Heart, Creativity

• Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Moving, Anxiety

  Rollo May (2009). “Man's Search for Himself”, p.169, W. W. Norton & Company

• Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

  Rollo May

  Responsibility, Community, Anxiety

  Rollo May (2015). “The Meaning of Anxiety”, p.132, W. W. Norton & Company

• In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of herd morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Maturity, Simple

  "Man's Search for Himself" by Rollo May, (p.191), 1953.

• Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims...That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Creativity, Using Your Talents

• ... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

  Rollo May

  Creativity, Artist, Creating

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.45, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

  Artist, Creative, Anxiety

• One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

  Rollo May

  Blessing, Anxiety, Age

  Rollo May (2009). “Man's Search for Himself”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company

• Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

  Rollo May

  Worry, Boredom, Anxiety

• Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.

  Rollo May

  People, Creative, Anxiety

• The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

  Rollo May

  Ideas, Joy, Anxiety

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.59, W. W. Norton & Company

• When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

  Rollo May

  Reading, Emotional, Profound

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

• It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

  Rollo May

  Motivation, Long, Anxiety

  Rollo May (2009). “Man's Search for Himself”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

• Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

  Rollo May

  Teacher, Reality, Anxiety

  Rollo May Ph.D. (2015). “The Meaning Of Anxiety”, p.66, Pickle Partners Publishing

• Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

  Rollo May

  Believe, Creativity, Joy

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