Rollo May Quotes

“Hiçbir yetenek inkarı cezasız kalmaz ve yeteneğin inkarına teşebbüsün adı nörozdur.”
― Rollo May

“Rollo May quipped that anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something. In other words, anxiety about nothingness quickly attaches itself to a tangible object.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“Permanence is no longer realistic; transience is considered normal. And that very normality turns into an invisible climate that quietly threatens one’s sense of existence.”
― DERYA KAYA, COMİNG BACK TO YOURSELF: THE PATH TO COPİNG AND RESİLİENCE

“Either I must be accepted as I am, or I must be brave enough to grow — knowing it may cost me my place among others.”
― DERYA KAYA, COMİNG BACK TO YOURSELF: THE PATH TO COPİNG AND RESİLİENCE

“Eros, the god of love, emerged to create the earth. Before, all was silent, bare, and motionless. Now all was life, joy, and motion. — Early Greek Myth”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Eros is the drive for union and reproduction in the biological realm. Even in the birds and animals, we see the "desire of procreation," and they are "in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union."

Human beings are changing all the time—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same.

Now in all this change, what binds the diversity together? It is eros, the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, and integration to counter our disintegrative trends. It is a dimension of experience which is psychological and emotional as well as biological. This is eros.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. — Socrates”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Man, this creature so 'noble in faculty,' moves step by step in a pilgrimage that is destined to bring him only back again to the inanimate state of the stone. From dust we are, and to dust we ultimately return.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“The confrontation with death—and the reprieve from it—makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful. Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die." — Abraham Maslow”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“The day when a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the day of her first love another. That continues so all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this a man does not know. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. She must always be maiden and always be mother. Before every love she is maiden, after every love she is mother." — An Abyssinian Noblewoman”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well." — Rainer Maria Rilke (On withdrawing from psychotherapy, Letter 74)”
― Rollo May, Love and Will