Rollo May Quotes

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

I wonder if anyone will ever know the emptiness of my life. Personal Diary -- Last entry Oh whats the point?

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

When you've nothing to live for, you get to thinking inside your head.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Oh, what a void there is in things.

Consciousness is a disease.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

When not deeply engaged in creative activities, or numbed out by the TV, I felt empty. My heart hurt. I often felt hollow or as if I were some sort of wispy ghost, barely existing.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

To a pagan, there is no purpose to suffering. As a result, he lives a life of loneliness and frustration.

As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.

It is very hard to stay alive just for your own sake. It is very hard to stare into day after day without another familiar face staring back. It turns your heart into a purposeless muscle.

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

How could someone with a life this full feel this empty?

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space?

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.