Carl Rogers Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing.

Carl Rogers
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Carl Rogers
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Carl Rogers
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 Rogers
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
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
Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.

Carl Rogers
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
I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with him; it enriches my life. It is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships.

Carl Rogers
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can 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 Rogers
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
Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?

Carl Rogers
Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.

Carl Rogers
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 Rogers
What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly.

Carl Rogers
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
Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues

Carl Rogers
The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism

Carl Rogers
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 in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets — neither Freud nor research — neither the revelations of God nor man — can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.

Carl Rogers
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
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 Rogers
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
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
Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group

Carl Rogers
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