Rollo May Quotes

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed.

Now that I know that I am no wiser than anyone else, does this wisdom make me wiser?

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.

When you're a woman in your thirties, and maybe you don't really know what you want to do with your life, but it seems like everyone else does, and your best friend gets married, and it forces you to look at yourself. I don't know if I described that in a very funny way.

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

I always think back to my childhood and I have a distinct memory of me not having any idea who I wanted to be. The funny thing is that I feel the same way now. So much time has passed and I haven't a definitive sense of self.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

If you trust yourself, any choice you make will be correct. If you do not trust yourself, anything you do will be wrong. - Kung Fu, The Legend Continues -

We do the best we can," she said softly, looking inward. "And punish ourselves for it. I've tried to make my choices with the idea that I've made those choices for the greatest good. Sometimes someone suffers in the process, but I made the decision for the right reason. That should count for something, shouldn't it?

If anything matters, then everything matters.

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.

At least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.

There aren't any answers, only choices

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

Fear keeps us rooted in the past. Fear of the unknown, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of the future-all these fears and more keep us trapped, repeating the same old patterns and making the same choices over and over again. Fear prevents us from moving outside the comfort-or even the familiar discomfort-of what we know. It's nearly impossible to achieve our highest vision for our lives as long as we are being guided by our fears.

What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.