Inspirational Quotes by Rollo May — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“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”

“Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.”

“During the long summers in New Hampshire when this book was being written I would often get up early in the morning and go out on my patio where the valley, stretching off to the mountain ranges in the north and east, was silver with predawn mist. The birds, eloquent voices in an otherwise silent world, had already begun their hallelujah chorus to welcome in the new day. The song sparrow sings with an enthusiasm which rocks him almost off his perch atop the apple tree, and the goldfinch chimes in with his obbligato. The thrush in the woods is so full of song he can't contain himself. The woodpecker beats on the hollow beech tree. The loons over on the lake erupt with their plaintive and tormented daemonic laughter, to save the whole thing from being too sweet. Then the sun comes up over the mountain range revealing an incredibly green New Hampshire overflowing through the whole long valley with a richness that is almost too abundant. The trees seem to have grown several inches overnight, and the meadow is bursting with a million brown-eyed Susans.”

“In such an age of radical transition, the individual is driven back into his own consciousness. When the foundations of love and will have been shaken and all but destroyed, we cannot escape the necessity of pushing below the surface and searching within our own consciousness and within the 'collective unarticulated consciousness' of our society for the sources of love and will. I use the term 'source' as the French speak of the 'source' of a river—the springs from which the water originally comes. If we can find the sources from which love and will spring, we may be able to discover the new forms which these essential experiences need in order to become viable in the new age into which we are moving. In this sense, our quest, like every such exploration, is a moral quest, for we are seeking the bases on which a morality for a new age can be founded. Every sensitive person finds himself in Stephen Dedalus' position: 'I go forth... to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

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

“We can no longer postpone the challenging question, How does one know that among the bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing his daimon? Inner 'voices'—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans of Arc. How about our schizophrenic patients who are instructed by their voices to bomb New York?”

“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”

“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.”

“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”

“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”

“What is love? He is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two. He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides men and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. — Diotima (quoted by Socrates)”

“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.”

“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,”

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