Top 100 Quotes About Carl Rogers
#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. 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
#5. There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.
Carl Rogers
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others.
Carl Rogers
#11. Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.
Carl Rogers
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. What you are to be, you are now becoming.
Carl Rogers
#17. Famous INFPs include Isabel Myers (creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), St. John the disciple, Carl Rogers, Princess Diana, George Orwell, Audrey Hepburn, Fred Rogers, A.A. Milne, Helen Keller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Julia Roberts, and William Shakespeare.
Molly Owens
#18. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
Carl Rogers
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."
Carl Rogers
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.
Carl Rogers
#25. 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
#26. Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.
Carl Rogers
#27. 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
#28. What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.
Carl R. Rogers
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.
Carl Rogers
#32. I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.
Carl R. Rogers
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process.
Carl R. Rogers
#37. Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?
Carl R. Rogers
#39. I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere - like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department - I would draw the other people.
Richard P. Feynman
#40. Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle knowledge exists primarily for use.
Carl Rogers
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. With the price of life these days, you've got to get everything for free you can.
Carl Rogers
#45. I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.
Carl R. Rogers
#46. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism
Carl Rogers
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.
Carl R. Rogers
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I like to think of myself as a quiet revolutionary.
Carl R. Rogers
#57. Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.
Carl Rogers
#58. 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
#59. The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
Carl R. Rogers
#60. 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
#61. Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
Carl Rogers
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl R. Rogers
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. You can't possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.
Carl R. Rogers
#69. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.
Carl Rogers
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.
Carl Rogers
#75. It is so obvious when a person is not hiding behind a facade but is speaking from deep within himself.
Carl R. Rogers
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.
Carl R. Rogers
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#87. Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.
Carl Rogers
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Each man must resolve within himself issues for which his society previously took full responsibility.
Carl R. Rogers
#93. Once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.
Carl R. Rogers
#94. 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
#95. Don't be a damned ammunition wagon. Be a rifle!
Carl Rogers
#96. Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
Carl Rogers
#97. 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
#98. People only seriously consider change when they feel accepted for exactly who they are.
Carl Rogers
#99. 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
#100. 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
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