Rollo May Quotes

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.

The man who speaks with primordial images, speaks with a thousand tongues.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

You know, when you're in your twenties you use a great deal of symbolism. You somehow think that a character standing beneath a cross is more interesting than a character standing underneath a billboard, but when you get a little older you realize that there's not much difference.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

I'm proud to be a symbol like the army knife or the mountains.

I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately - like Joseph Campbell - that has made me realize that people in our cultural, especially in the liberal community, often go in search of a foe. It's like we always need a hill to climb up or something to push against, or we feel as if we're not working constructively in the world.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.