Rollo May — Quote from Love and Will
“To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.”
Love and Will (1969)
Concepts: love, authenticity, meaning
Resonant Quotes
- “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds...” — bell hooks, All About Love May's definition of love as necessarily embracing the negative directly explains the psychological mechanism behind h...
- “The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the close...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment May's psychology perfectly explicates Dostoevsky's spiritual insight — both recognize that authentic love and connect...
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out Both philosophers argue that authentic human experience requires embracing vulnerability and the full spectrum of exi...
- “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothin...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Both conceive of profound acceptance as requiring embrace of the painful alongside the pleasurable—Nietzsche wanting ...
- “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds...” — bell hooks, All About Love May's insight that love requires embracing suffering directly illuminates hooks' observation about our tendency to fl...
- “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving May's insight that love requires openness to suffering directly challenges Fromm's characterization of love as a 'sat...
- “Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a standing in, not a falling...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving Both existential psychologists reconceptualize love as an active engagement with reality rather than a passive emotio...
- “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people a...” — bell hooks, All About Love May's recognition that love requires openness to both positive and negative experiences directly supports hooks' visi...