Quotes by Carl Rogers

“Real communication occurs...when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view, to sense how it feels to h...”

“Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his ...”

“Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields o...”

“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.”

“I have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real...Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicat...”

“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 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.”

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

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

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

“Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture...”

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

“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 exp...”

“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 wh...”

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

“What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationshipto him. Then perhaps he can be what he is, openly and without...”

“... I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which ...”

“I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or ni...”