Carl Rogers
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.Collection: Art
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.Collection: Good
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.Collection: Experience
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?Collection: Relationship
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.Collection: Change
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Learning
When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.
The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.
With the price of life these days, you've got to get everything for free you can.
Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Sunset
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.Collection: Real
As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.Collection: Experts
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.Collection: Hurt
A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learningCollection: Teach
People only seriously consider change when they feel accepted for exactly who they are.Collection: People
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.Collection: Responsibility
The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others.Collection: Inspirational
What you are to be, you are now becoming.Collection: Growth
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Strong
Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.Collection: Process
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.Collection: Emotional
Life is about Being & Becoming.Collection: Change
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.Collection: Hurt
what is most personal is most universalCollection: Universal
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.Collection: Self
Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.Collection: Men
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.Collection: Elements
Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Good Life
Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle... knowledge exists primarily for use.Collection: Rifles
There are as many "real worlds" as there are people!Collection: Life
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.Collection: Health
It's an awful risky thing to liveCollection: Awful
Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.Collection: Years
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 providedCollection: Attitude
there is direction but there is no destinationCollection: Destination
So, as you can readily see from what I have said thus far, a creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic, nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship. It is important for me to provide it; it has been extremely important, especially at certain times in my life, to receive it. I feel that I have grown within myself when I have provided it; I am very sure that I have grown and been released and enhanced when I have received this kind of listening.Collection: Empathy
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.Collection: Believe
Adults who think that children must be manipulated for their own good have developed the attitude of a controlling parent who lacks faith in himself, the child, or humanity or himself.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Needs
I prize the privilege of being alone.Collection: Solitude
You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Essence
I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.Collection: Religious