Zitat des Tages von Rollo May:
It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.
One does not become fully human painlessly.
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.
Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.
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.
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
Human dignity is based upon freedom, and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the other.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.
The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.
Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.
Freedom always deals with 'the possible'; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination, and its dangers.
