Fritz Perls Quotes

“A thousand plastic flowers don't make a desert bloom. A thousand empty faces don't fill an empty room.”

“Anxiety is the gap between now and later.”

“Awareness in itself is healing.”

“Don't push the river, it flows by itself.”

“Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference.”

“I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.”

“I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.”

“If you are bored, you are not paying attention.”

“If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence-the very moment you get in touch with yourself-growth begins, integration begins.”

“It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.”

“Learning is discovering that somethinkg is possible.”

“Man transcends himself only via his true nature, not through ambition and artificial goals.”

“Nobody can stand truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable.”

“Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.”

“Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.”

“So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second.”

“Teaching means to show a person that something is possible.”

“The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man knows he's playing.”

“The person most in control is the person who can give up control.”

“There's always a possibility of richer maturation – of taking more and more responsibility for yourself and for your life. And this is what I hope, to make you understand how much you gain by taking re-sponsibility for every emotion, every movement you make, every thought you have. We touch each other by honestly being what we are, not intentionally making contact.”

“Those that fight don't listen, those that listen don't fight.”

“To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.”

“We are using most of our energies for self-destructive games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.”

“We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.”

“You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?”

“All emotions are expressed in the muscular system. You cannot visualize anger without muscle movement. You cannot visualize joy, which is more or less identical to dancing, without muscle movements. In sorrow there are sobs and crying, and in sex there is also.”

“And if you refuse to remember your dreams, you really refuse to face your own existence – to face what is wrong with your existence. One avoids struggling with unpleasant issues.”

“Anguish is always the result of moving away from the now.”

“Being in the world with its ups and downs, alone or accompanied, is part of the same thing: existing in the here and now.”

“Emotions are not nuisances that need to be discharged. Emotions are the most important drivers of our behavior: emotion in the broadest sense – waiting, enjoyment, hunger. These basic emotions or energy, this vital force, apparently differentiate in the organism by what I call differentiation.”