Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Frederick Salomon Perls

Humans don't really improve on our own functioning, we only interfere with it, distort it, and disguise it.

...nobody can stand truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage.

We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.

So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second

I wonder why people use only walls for hanging pictures.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.

Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.

Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference.

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

I believe that any single dream contains the essential message about our existence.

Those that fight don't listen, those that listen don't fight.

Learning is discovering that somethinkg is possible.

As Albert Einstein once said to me: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity." But what is much more widespread than the actual stupidity is the playing stupid, turning off your ear, not listening, not seeing.

Anxiety is the gap between now and later.

If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence-the very moment you get in touch with yourself-growth begins, integration begins.

Awareness in itself is healing.

There's always a possibility of richer maturation - of taking more and more responsibility for yourself and for your life...And this is what I hope...to make you understand how much you gain by taking re-sponsibility for every emotion, every movement you make, every thought you have...We touch each other by honestly being what we are, not intentionally making contact.

Fear is excitement without the breath.

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.

If you are bored, you are not paying attention.

It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.

The person most in control is the person who can give up control.

A thousand plastic flowers don't make a desert bloom. A thousand empty faces don't fill an empty room".

Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.

I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.

The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man knows he's playing.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?

I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.

Teaching means to show a person that something is possible.