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"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."
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"Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief, it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living."

"I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own."

"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence."

"The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool."

"The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously."

"We are all wrong so often that it amazes me that we can have any conviction at all over the direction of things to come. But we must."

"I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect."

"When you lack the courage to publicly defend biblical truth, it is a clear testimony that you lack the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Holy Spirit is a gift of no fear."

"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

"Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct."
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."


"Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built."


"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."
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