Rollo Reece May (1909–94) was an American existential psychologist. He was the author of the influential book Love and Will, which was published in 1969. He is often associated with both humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy. He along with Viktor Frankl was a major proponent of “existential psychotherapy,” which seeks to analyze the structure of human existence with the aim of understanding the reality underlying all situations of humans in crises (). May was a close friend of the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, who also had a significant influence on his work. His works include The Meaning of Anxiety, Love and Will, and The Courage to Create, the latter title honoring Tillich’s The Courage to Be.
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Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
—Rollo May
Topics: Freedom
Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
—Rollo May
Topics: Act, Love, Independence, General
Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union.
—Rollo May
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.
—Rollo May
Topics: Freedom
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s convictions not obstinately or defiantly (these are gestures of defensiveness, not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation, but simply because these are what one believes.
—Rollo May
Topics: Courage, Conviction
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
Topics: Instincts
There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
—Rollo May
Topics: Change
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men”.
—Rollo May
Topics: Best
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.
—Rollo May
Topics: Excitement, Life, Experience, Joy, Happiness, Nature
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
—Rollo May
Topics: Hatred, Hate, One liners, Apathy
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
—Rollo May
Topics: Courage
If the will remains in protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against.
—Rollo May
Topics: Forgiveness, Hatred
In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
—Rollo May
Topics: Appropriateness, Aptness
Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
—Rollo May
Topics: Compassion, Kindness
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But 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
Topics: People, Nature, Choice, Bravery, Decision, Growth, Decisions, Courage, Commitment
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
—Rollo May
Topics: Creativity
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
—Rollo May
Topics: Depression, Despair, One liners
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart”. Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
—Rollo May
Topics: Virtue, Heart, Values, Courage, Create
Humor is the healthy way of feeling “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problems with perspective.
—Rollo May
Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities.
—Rollo May
Topics: Potential, Life
Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.
—Rollo May
Topics: Courage
What is courage? This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
—Rollo May
Topics: Try, Courage, Despair
To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.
—Rollo May
Topics: Courage, Cowardice
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.
—Rollo May
Topics: Health, Doubt, Commitment
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.
—Rollo May
Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as he continues to grow, to move ahead.
—Rollo May
Topics: Courage
Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
—Rollo May
Topics: Life and Living
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