Carl R. Rogers Quotes Page 3

“I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.”

“I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. To hell with it!

I think from now on I’m going to just be me — rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.”

“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.”

“In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not.”

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

It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process.”

“Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”

“Once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.”

“Perhaps it is less important that a teacher cover the allotted amount of the curriculum, or use the most approved audio-visual devices, than that he be congruent, real, in his relation to his students.”

“So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning.”

“The concept of 'cure' is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease.”

“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.”

“The more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where he recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, lies within himself.”

“The 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.”

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

“To be responsibly self-directing means that one chooses—and then learns from the consequences. So clients find this a sobering but exciting kind of experience.”

“To understand another person's thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for him, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return – this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all too rare.”

“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.”

“What is most personal is most universal.”