Top 63 Carl R. Rogers Quotes
#1. I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.
Carl R. Rogers
#2. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
Carl R. Rogers
#3. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#4. I found myself doing this same thing - playing a role of having greater certainty and greater competence than I really possess. I can't tell you how disgusted with myself I felt as I realized what I was doing: I was not being me, I was playing a part.
Carl R. Rogers
#5. The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy - man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.
Carl R. Rogers
#6. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#7. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#8. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#9. To recognize that "I am the one who chooses" and "I am the one who determines the value of an experience for me" is both an invigoraring and a frightening realization.
Carl R. Rogers
#10. 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?
Carl R. Rogers
#11. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#12. Change threatens, and its possibility creates frightened, angry people. They are found in their purest essence on the extreme right, but in all of us there is some fear of process, of change.
Carl R. Rogers
#13. Can I "accept" a person's anger at me as an authentic aspect of himself? Can I "accept" the person if his beliefs and values are different from mine?
Carl R. Rogers
#14. What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.
Carl R. Rogers
#15. I've always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#16. The conviction grows in me that we shall discover laws of personality and behavior which are as significant for human progress or human understanding as the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics.
Carl R. Rogers
#17. I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.
Carl R. Rogers
#18. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#19. The intolerant "true believer" is a menace to any field, yet I suspect each one of us finds traces of that person in ourself.
Carl R. Rogers
#20. To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process.
Carl R. Rogers
#21. Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?
Carl R. Rogers
#23. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#24. Can I freely permit this staff member or my son or my daughter to become a separate person with ideas, purposes, and values which may not be identical with my own?
Carl R. Rogers
#25. In therapy the individual learns to recognize and express his feelings as his own feelings, not as a fact about another person.
Carl R. Rogers
#26. I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.
Carl R. Rogers
#27. It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
Carl R. Rogers
#28. 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
Carl R. Rogers
#29. Small wonder that we prefer to approach therapy with many rigid preconceptions. We feel we must bring order to it. We can scarcely dare to hope that we can discover order in it.
Carl R. Rogers
#30. I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.
Carl R. Rogers
#31. If awareness and conscious thought are seen as a part of life - not its master nor its opponent but an illumination of the developing process within the individual - then our total life can be the unified and unifying experience that is characteristic in nature.
Carl R. Rogers
#32. I like to think of myself as a quiet revolutionary.
Carl R. Rogers
#33. if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself.
Carl R. Rogers
#34. The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
Carl R. Rogers
#35. When the locus of evaluation is seen as residing in the expert, it would appear that the long-range social implications are in the direction of the social control of the many by the few.
Carl R. Rogers
#36. Man's awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I
Carl R. Rogers
#37. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl R. Rogers
#38. True empathy is always free of any evaluative or diagnostic quality. This comes across to the recipient with some surprise. If I am not being judged, perhaps I am not so evil or abnormal as I have thought.
Carl R. Rogers
#39. You can't possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.
Carl R. Rogers
#40. When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.
Carl R. Rogers
#41. It is so obvious when a person is not hiding behind a facade but is speaking from deep within himself.
Carl R. Rogers
#42. From what I have been saying, I trust it is clear that when I can permit realness in myself or sense it or permit it in another, I am very satisfied. When I cannot permit it in myself or fail to permit it in another, I am very distressed.
Carl R. Rogers
#43. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#44. Colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.
Carl R. Rogers
#45. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#46. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#47. 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#48. Each man must resolve within himself issues for which his society previously took full responsibility.
Carl R. Rogers
#49. Once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.
Carl R. Rogers
#50. I am less and less a creature of influences in myself which operate beyond my ken in the realms of the unconscious. I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality, my 'isness,' become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.
Carl R. Rogers
#51. 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,
Carl R. Rogers
#52. The only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture.
Carl R. Rogers
#53. I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me.
- Ellen West
Carl R. Rogers
#55. Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.
Carl R. Rogers
#56. 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!
Carl R. Rogers
#57. Group of us felt that ideas were being fed to us, whereas we wished primarily to explore our own questions and doubts, and find out where they led.
Carl R. Rogers
#58. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you 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.
Carl R. Rogers
#59. There is no organised encounter group. There is simply a freedom of expression - of feelings and thoughts - on any personally relevant issue.
Carl R. Rogers
#60. The strongest force in our universe is not overriding power, but love.
Carl R. Rogers
#61. We live by a perceptual "map" which is never reality itself.
Carl R. Rogers
#62. 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,
Carl R. Rogers
#63. The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Carl R. Rogers
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
