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"When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean's office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft - spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age - old capacity to be insurgent."
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"Movies can be instruments of enlightenment."

"The goal of art was the vital expression of self."

"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."

"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."

"When whisperedwhat an exquisitesong, it makes-your name."

"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved."

"It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on."
Explore more quotes by Rollo May


"A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat."


"Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations."


"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."


"Sisyphus, ' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher, ' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny."


"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."


"Anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out"


"One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism."


"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."
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