May was born in 1909 in Ada, Ohio. His sister developed schizophrenia and his parents divorced, making for a challenging upbringing. His academic journey began with a major in English at Michigan State College, followed by a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College, a stint as a Greek teacher, a BD from Union Theological Seminary in 1938, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1949. Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco was founded by May, who also served as a faculty member there.

Rollo May Quotes

01. “It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
― Rollo May

02. “Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May

03. “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May

04. “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”
― Rollo May

05. “Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.”
― Rollo May

06. “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21)”
― Rollo May

07. “Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.”
― Rollo May

08. “A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May

09. “Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)”
― Rollo May

10. “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
― Rollo May

11. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
― Rollo May

12. “What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
― Rollo May

13. “One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
― Rollo May

14. “One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.”
― Rollo May

15. “It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.”
― Rollo May

16. “The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May

17. “It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
― Rollo May

18. “Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
― Rollo May

19. “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

20. “When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
― Rollo May

21. “Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May

22. “There is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.”
― Rollo May

23. “I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”
― Rollo May

24. “I became a psychotherapist because that’s where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.”
― Rollo May

25. “One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.”
― Rollo May

26. “There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.”
― Rollo May

27. “Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home…To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths…”
― Rollo May

28. “In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.”
― Rollo May

29. “Finding the center of strenghth within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man”
― Rollo May

30. “Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.”
― Rollo May

31. “They showed considerable anxiety because they were in the process of loving beauty.”
― Rollo May

32. “One has to remain detached in order to triumph over others”
― Rollo May

33. “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

34. “Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.”
― Rollo May

35. “Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.”
― Rollo May

36. “Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.”
― Rollo May

37. “Much self-condemnation is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza’s remark “One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man.”
― Rollo May

38. “Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern man, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being “hollow” and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.”
― Rollo May

39. “Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.”
― Rollo May

40. “The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.”
― Rollo May

41. “The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.”
― Rollo May

42. “Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.”
― Rollo May

43. “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

44. “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.”
― Rollo May

45. “Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.”
― Rollo May

46. “I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.”
― Rollo May

47. “It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.”
― Rollo May

48. “Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.”
― Rollo May

49. “One does not become fully human painlessly”
― Rollo May

50. “Eros is the center of the vitality of a culture–its heart and soul.”
― Rollo May

51. “Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.”
― Rollo May

52. “Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that “elegance”—as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries—is a key to ultimate reality?”
― Rollo May

53. “The “stuffed men” are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they “lean together”; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.”
― Rollo May

54. “It takes a strong self—that is, a strong sense of personal identity—to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up.”
― Rollo May

55. “Whether we are ‘Freudians’ or not, as I am not, we are surely all post-Freudian. He set the tone for vast changes in our culture”
― Rollo May

56. “[A] man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.”
― Rollo May

57. “ conscious anxiety is more painful but it is available also to use in the service of integration of the self.”
― Rollo May

58. “Myth safeguards and enforces morality,” as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality.”
― Rollo May

59. “the present phase of our century may well be called, as Auden and Camus call it, the “age of overt anxiety.”
― Rollo May

60. “People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.”
― Rollo May

61. “It is extremely interesting that when people become ill in organic ways, anxiety tends to disappear.”
― Rollo May

62. “Anxiety is not an affect among other affects, such as pleasure or sadness. It is rather an ontological characteristic of man, rooted in his very existence as such.”
― Rollo May

64. “The individual’s striving for his own gain, in fine, without an equal emphasis on social welfare, no longer automatically brings good to the community.”
― Rollo May

65. “A sick toss’d vessel, dashing on each thing . . . My God, I mean myself.”
― Rollo May

66. “When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen,” said Goethe,”
― Rollo May

67. “Again, we find in modern art and modern music a language which does not communicate.”
― Rollo May

68. “Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him.”
― Rollo May

69. “But the difference in our day is that the fear of loneliness is much more extensive, and the defenses against it—diversions, social rounds, and “being liked”—are more rigid and compulsive.”
― Rollo May

70. “namely that man does not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills his potentialities only as he in his own consciousness plans and chooses.”
― Rollo May

71. “Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us.”
― Rollo May

72. “in psychology I do not believe “stress” encompasses the rich meaning of anxiety.”
― Rollo May

73 “But 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

74. “ the reaction is disproportionate to the objective danger because some intrapsychic conflict is involved. Thus the reaction is never disproportionate to the subjective threat.”
― Rollo May

75. “Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.”
― Rollo May

76. “Dacă vrem să cunoaștem pe cineva, trebuie să avem cel puțin disponibilitatea de a iubi acea persoană”
― Rollo May

77. “In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.”
― Rollo May

78. “how unfortunate it is that self-consciousness is identified in this country with morbid introspection, shyness and embarrassment.”
― Rollo May

79. “the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.”
― Rollo May

80. “The purpose of the present study is to bring, so far as we are able, some “order and lucidity” into the presently uncoordinated field of anxiety theory.”
― Rollo May

81. “…what an individual seeks to become determines what he remembers of his has been. In this sense the future determines the past.”
― Rollo May

82. “the fear of fertility”
― Rollo May

83. “The novel is a haunting and subtly terrifying picture of the modern man who is truly a “stranger” to himself.”
― Rollo May

84. “…people grasp at political authoritarianism in the desperate need to be relieved of anxiety.”
― Rollo May

85. “. . .there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound up 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.”
― Rollo May

86. “Neurotic anxiety is nature’s way, as it were, of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem.”
― Rollo May

87. “Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel.”
― Rollo May

88. “The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality.”
― Rollo may

89. “Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.”
― Rollo May

90. “one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary if we are to move toward self-realization.”
― Rollo May

91. “Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier.”
― Rollo May

92. “Among the works of man,”
― Rollo May

93. “Neurosis may be called a negating of possibilities; it is the shrinking up of one’s world. The development of the self is this radically curtailed.”
― Rollo May

94. “It is interesting that they sometimes say that if they were alone for long they wouldn’t be able to work or play in order to get tired; and so they wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
― Rollo May

95. “In its extreme form, this fear of losing one’s orientation is the fear of psychosis. When persons actually are on the brink of psychosis, they often have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings.”
― Rollo May

96. “But how can one write a book with any integrity,” he wonders, “if there is no assurance of the few years time any good book takes?”
― Rollo May