9 Rollo May Quotes on Freedom

Rollo May quotes on freedom

5. Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

10. 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.

14. The practical implication is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.

49. Dogmatists 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 destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.

54. This chapter is thus an essay on the creating of one's self. The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming. Despite the obvious determinism in human life-especially in the physical aspect of ones self in such simple things as color of eyes, height relative length of life, and so on-there is also, clearly, this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.

55. Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

65. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

68. 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.

102. Freedom and Destiny (1981)