Rollo May Quotes

Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying, and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don't want to be dropped naked into a swamp. We want to tour Yosemite with our water bottles and G.P.S. devices. The natural world is a source of happiness and fulfillment, but only when prescribed in the right doses.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

Nature is a dream state at this point, that we almost don't have a real relationship to it unless it's people living off the land and killing our own food and going for it.

Simply to pit "society" against "nature," "humanity" against the "biosphere," and "reason," "technology," and "science" against less developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their solutions.

If you look at all the technology we're interconnected with every day, all this complex technology that connects humanity, it actually doesn't connect us.

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune.

Your nature is not the problem. The problem is that you have become alienated from your nature -- from your power source.

The Physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.

What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

If there's something I feel certain of, it is that we're not very aware of each other and that's largely because of social media.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket -- not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.

Growing up I had a real disconnect with the planet.

You see people walking down the street with ear buds on and looking at this or whatever, talking to themselves. So there's more and more opportunity to never be where we actually are and just be.

Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.

There is no wilderness. There is only our inability to fill the emptiness in which we live.