Carl R. Rogers Quotes

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”

“There is direction but there is no destination.”

“If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual”

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be… When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner"… I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

“The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.”

“When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me”

“Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.”

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

“a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”

“What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly.”

“We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.”

“Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”

“It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.”

“Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle … knowledge exists primarily for use.”

“Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression”

“Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future”

“There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.”

“Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group”

“Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues”

“The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.”

“Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture especially, with its emphasis on speed, already pressed managers may give short shrift to the slower art of one-on-one communication.”

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.”

“Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem”

“I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis”