Carl R. Rogers Quotes

“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.”

“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.”