Rollo May Quotes

It's easier to shut yourself off outside than reveal your inner thoughts.

People can be cruel, but that doesn't mean you have to take it home, wrap yourself up in it and wear it.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.

Sometimes my dreams are so deep that I dream that I'm dreaming.

We are not our body, that we have a body, but a body is not who we are. We are that which possesses a body, and that which stands outside of the body, if you please, and exists quite apart and independent from it, and uses the body as a device or tool.

I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.

Unconscious means identified totally with thought. You reduce reality to a conceptual reality.

Life is what you allow yourself not to see.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.

For a long time humans probably were in touch on a deeper level with the depths of their being, unconsciously so, the same way an animal or a tree is. Gradually, though, more and more of their identity went into the movement of thought. They identified more and more with the movement of thinking.

Meditation is the alchemy of transforming. The unconscious into the conscious. It gives you a tremendous power, Far greater than anger, greed and lust.

It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral.It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.