Carl Rogers Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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
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. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.

Carl Rogers
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
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 Rogers
When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another.

Carl Rogers
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.

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
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 Rogers
Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem

Carl Rogers
Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression

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
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
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
Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle … knowledge exists primarily for use.

Carl Rogers
There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.

Carl Rogers
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, but without ever losing the "as if" condition. Thus, it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth.

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

Carl Rogers
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.

Carl Rogers