"One does not become fully human painlessly"
About this Quote
Rollo May, the American existential psychologist, insists that growth does not arrive wrapped in comfort. Becoming fully human is not a matter of accumulating pleasures or avoiding discomfort; it is a process of confronting anxiety, loss, and ambiguity and allowing those experiences to deepen character. May drew on Kierkegaard and Heidegger to argue that anxiety is not merely a symptom to be eliminated but a signal that we are up against what matters most: freedom, responsibility, love, death, and meaning. The attempt to bypass pain flattens life into numb routine, leaving a person safe but shallow.
He distinguished between normal anxiety, which accompanies real choices and change, and neurotic anxiety, which festers when we flee what must be faced. Moving toward authenticity requires the courage to endure the normal anxiety of becoming. Therapy, in May’s vision, is not a promise to remove pain but a space to transform it, to turn raw suffering into insight, will, and a reclaimed capacity to love.
The creative act illustrates this ethic. To create is to enter the unknown, risk failure, and shatter old forms. It hurts to abandon familiar identities or to confront the void before something new emerges, yet that is how a fuller self is forged. The same holds in relationships: to love is to risk grief; to commit is to foreclose other possibilities; to forgive is to relinquish the consolations of resentment. Pain is not the goal, but it is the cost of choosing a life that is truly one’s own.
May warned that a culture devoted to comfort breeds conformity and spiritual emptiness. Avoidance breeds a brittle self; engagement cultivates depth. To become fully human is to metabolize suffering into meaning, to hold tension without collapsing, and to act with integrity despite fear. Courage does not cancel pain; it makes it transformative.
He distinguished between normal anxiety, which accompanies real choices and change, and neurotic anxiety, which festers when we flee what must be faced. Moving toward authenticity requires the courage to endure the normal anxiety of becoming. Therapy, in May’s vision, is not a promise to remove pain but a space to transform it, to turn raw suffering into insight, will, and a reclaimed capacity to love.
The creative act illustrates this ethic. To create is to enter the unknown, risk failure, and shatter old forms. It hurts to abandon familiar identities or to confront the void before something new emerges, yet that is how a fuller self is forged. The same holds in relationships: to love is to risk grief; to commit is to foreclose other possibilities; to forgive is to relinquish the consolations of resentment. Pain is not the goal, but it is the cost of choosing a life that is truly one’s own.
May warned that a culture devoted to comfort breeds conformity and spiritual emptiness. Avoidance breeds a brittle self; engagement cultivates depth. To become fully human is to metabolize suffering into meaning, to hold tension without collapsing, and to act with integrity despite fear. Courage does not cancel pain; it makes it transformative.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
|---|
More Quotes by Rollo
Add to List
