Philosophy Quote by Rollo May — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Eros, the god of love, emerged to create the earth. Before, all was silent, bare, and motionless. Now all was life, joy, and motion. — Early Greek Myth”

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”

“What is love? He is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two. He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides men and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. — Diotima (quoted by Socrates)”

“We can no longer postpone the challenging question, How does one know that among the bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing his daimon? Inner 'voices'—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans of Arc. How about our schizophrenic patients who are instructed by their voices to bomb New York?”

“The day when a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the day of her first love another. That continues so all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this a man does not know. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. She must always be maiden and always be mother. Before every love she is maiden, after every love she is mother." — An Abyssinian Noblewoman”

“When the mind is free, magic happens.”

“A new beginning is an illusion.”

“O principal é não mentir. Quem mente para si mesmo e dá ouvido à sua própria mentira chega a tal extremo que não consegue ver nenhuma verdade em si ou naqueles que o rodeiam e, por conseguinte, perde completamente o respeito por si e pelos outros. (...) Quem mente a si próprio pode ser o primeiro a ofender-se. Às vezes, é tão agradável uma pessoa se ofender, não é verdade? O indivíduo sabe que ninguém o injuriou, que tudo não passa de simples invenção, que ele próprio mentiu e exagerou apenas para criar um quadro, para fazer de um grão uma montanha - sabe tudo e, no entanto, se ofende. Ofende-se a ponto se sentir prazer na ofensa e, desse modo, atinge o verdadeiro ódio...”

“Sooner or later, you will have to decide. Whether you want to drift with the current or whether you want to lay down your own path. Trust me, nobody in this world really knows where he is headed. Yes, of course, you will find people who say that they know how to live their lives. But even they can’t answer where their lives would lead. So, decide! What is more important to you? How? Where? Or why?”

“Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality”