Top 62 Carl Rogers Quotes
#1. If I were to search for the central core of difficulty in people as I have come to know them, it is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, regarding themselves as worthless and unlovable.
Carl Rogers
#2. There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.
Carl Rogers
#3. The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others.
Carl Rogers
#4. Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.
Carl Rogers
#5. I have learned that in any significant or continuing relationship, feelings which are persistent had best be expressed. If they are expressed as feelings owned by me, the result may be temporarily upsetting but ultimately far more rewarding than any attempt to deny or conceal them.
Carl Rogers
#6. What you are to be, you are now becoming.
Carl Rogers
#7. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
Carl Rogers
#8. We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.
Carl Rogers
#9. To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."
Carl Rogers
#10. I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.
Carl Rogers
#11. In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.
Carl Rogers
#12. Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.
Carl Rogers
#13. It is that the individual has within him or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering the self-concept basic attitudes, and his or her self-directed behavior - and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided
Carl Rogers
#14. The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.
Carl Rogers
#15. Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.
Carl Rogers
#16. Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle knowledge exists primarily for use.
Carl Rogers
#17. With the price of life these days, you've got to get everything for free you can.
Carl Rogers
#18. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism
Carl Rogers
#19. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. 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.
Carl Rogers
#20. I realize that if I were stable, prudent and static; I'd live in death. Therefore I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear and emotional ups and downs; because that's the price I'm willing to pay for a fluid, perplexed and exciting life.
Carl Rogers
#21. The most valuable information on how to maintain or save relationships comes from scientific observation of couples in action, right down to the microexpressions and apparently inane comments seen in everyday conversations.
Carl Rogers
#22. A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.
Carl Rogers
#23. Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.
Carl Rogers
#24. Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
Carl Rogers
#25. If I can listen to what he can tell me, if I can understand how it seems to him; if I can see its personal meaning for him, if I can sense the emotional flavor which it has for him, then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him.
Carl Rogers
#26. Both the young and the old are almost completely useless in our modern society, and are made keenly aware of that uselessness. They have no place. They are private, isolated - and hopeless.
Carl Rogers
#27. Learning of all kinds goes on best, lasts best, and tends to lead itself on more when it grows out of a real focus of interest in the learner.
Carl Rogers
#28. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.
Carl Rogers
#29. Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.
Carl Rogers
#30. We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood.
Carl Rogers
#32. I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.
Carl Rogers
#33. The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many "real worlds" as there are people!
Carl Rogers
#34. The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.
Carl Rogers
#36. I have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real ... Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicated unambiguously?
Carl Rogers
#37. The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.
Carl Rogers
#38. Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.
Carl Rogers
#40. Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.
Carl Rogers
#41. If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
Carl Rogers
#42. Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself.
Carl Rogers
#43. I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
Carl Rogers
#44. Don't be a damned ammunition wagon. Be a rifle!
Carl Rogers
#45. Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
Carl Rogers
#46. The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity - the uniqueness of being "me" - are experienced
Carl Rogers
#47. People only seriously consider change when they feel accepted for exactly who they are.
Carl Rogers
#48. Real communication occurs ... when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.
Carl Rogers
#49. A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learning
Carl Rogers
#50. Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.
Carl Rogers
#51. His experiencing is process in nature, feeling the new in each situation and interpreting it anew, interpreting it in terms of the past only to the extent that the now is identical with the past.
Carl Rogers
#52. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.
Carl Rogers
#53. The education situation which most effectively promotes significant learning is one in which (1) threat to the self of the learner is reduced to a minimum and (2) differential perception of the field of experience is facilitated
Carl Rogers
#54. As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.
Carl Rogers
#55. Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.
Carl Rogers
#56. Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.
Carl Rogers
#57. The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over.
Carl Rogers
#58. If the time comes when our culture tires of the endless homicidal feuds, despairs of the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with the half-lives that its members are living - only then will our culture seriously look for alternatives.
Carl Rogers
#60. Adults who think that children must be manipulated for their own good have developed the attitude of a controlling parent who lacks faith in himself, the child, or humanity or himself.
Carl Rogers
#62. When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.
Carl Rogers
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