“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
— Carl R. Rogers
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
“What you are to be, you are now becoming.”
“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.”
“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 good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
“Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.”
“Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.”
“When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.”
“Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”
“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?”
“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.”
“A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another’s learning.”
“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.”
“As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.”
“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.”
“What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.”
“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.”
“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!”
“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.”
“People only seriously consider change when they feel accepted for exactly who they are.”
“Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”
“Experience is the highest authority.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It is a direction not a destination.”
“The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.”
“It’s an awful risky thing to live.”
“It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.”
“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”.”
“There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!”
“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”.”
“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.”
“Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood.”
“To be original, or different, is felt to be “dangerous.””
“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.”
“The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.”
“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.”
“Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.”
“There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.”
“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 organism has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism.”
“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.”
“We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.”
“Don’t be a damned ammunition wagon. Be a rifle!”
“I prize the privilege of being alone.”
“Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.”
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