Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Carl Rogers

When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.

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.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

With the price of life these days, you've got to get everything for free you can.

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

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.

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?

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.

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.

The way of being with another person which is termed empathic...means temporarily living in their life, moving abut in it delicately without making judgment... to be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter the other's world without prejudice...a complex, demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of being.

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.

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.

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".

What you are to be, you are now becoming.

It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.

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.

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

I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person. So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?

To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."

Life is about Being & Becoming.

I think my deepest criticism of the educational system . . . is that it's all based upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not.

The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others.

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.

People only seriously consider change when they feel accepted for exactly who they are.

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.

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.

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

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".

What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.

Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.

The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.

I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality... become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.

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 me.

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

No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.

The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust.

Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.

We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.

A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learning

When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good. . . . When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.

what is most personal is most universal

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

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.

Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.

Experience is, for me, the highest authority.

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.

I have come to think that one of the most satisfying experiences I know — and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person — is just fully to appreciate this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset.

Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?

Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.

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

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.

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