Carl R. Rogers Quotes Page 2

“When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for.

The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another.”

“I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself.

To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing, but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it.”

“I like to think of myself as a quiet revolutionary.”

“I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.”

“I would prefer my experiences in communication to have a growth-promoting effect, both on me and on the other, and I should like to avoid those communication experiences in which both I and the other person feel diminished.”

“It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.”

“It is so obvious when a person is not hiding behind a facade but is speaking from deep within himself.”

“One of the most satisfying feelings I know — and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person — comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset.

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. In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it.”

“The intolerant 'true believer' is a menace to any field, yet I suspect each one of us finds traces of that person in ourself.”

“The paradigm of Western culture is that the essence of persons is dangerous; thus, they must be taught, guided and controlled by those with superior authority.”

“The strongest force in our universe is not overriding power, but love.”

“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.”

“When you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you without passing judgement on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good.

When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on.

It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.”

“Helping individuals become individuals is much more fundamental than helping them become mathematicians or translators or anyone else.”

“If a person involved in a relationship looks at all their terrible, abnormal, disgusting, touching, sympathetic and strong sides with affection, then they are more suitable for relationships.”

“Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived”

“Each man must resolve within himself issues for which his society previously took full responsibility.”

“The only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture.”

“We live by a perceptual 'map' which is never reality itself.”

“You can't possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.”

“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.”

“Adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful.

This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.

Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”

“Another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.”

“Evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn.”

“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 me.”

“Having received an education, we usually become conformists with stereotypical thinking. People with a 'complete' education, and not free, creative and original thinking people.”

“He is learning that the feelings which exist are good enough to live by. They do not have to be coated with a veneer.”

“I find that this desire to be all of oneself in each moment — all the richness and complexity, with nothing hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself — this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy.

I do not need to say that this is a difficult, and in its absolute sense an impossible goal. Yet one of the most evident trends in clients is to move toward becoming all of the complexity of one’s changing self in each significant moment.”

“I have come to feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward.”

“I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.”