Quote #41

But those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists-the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images-poetic, 'aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations.

More from Rollo May

  1. The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but…
  2. [Artists] love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsat…
  3. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns …
  4. Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This i…
  5. The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of insti…
  6. The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the ex…
  7. Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality t…
  8. Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint-they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed i…

All Rollo May quotes