Top 120 Carl R. Rogers Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

52. “It seems to me to have value because the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change.”

— Carl R. Rogers

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

— Carl R. Rogers

54. “Don’t be a damned ammunition wagon. Be a rifle!”

— Carl R. Rogers

55. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

56. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

57. “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 in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets – neither Freud nor research – neither the revelations of God nor man – can take precedence over my own direct experience.”

— Carl R. Rogers

58. “In therapy the individual learns to recognize and express his feelings as his own feelings, not as a fact about another person.”

— Carl R. Rogers

59. “The only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture.”

— Carl R. Rogers

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

— Carl R. Rogers

61. “The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity – the uniqueness of being “me” – are experienced.”

— Carl R. Rogers

62. “Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.”

— Carl R. Rogers

63. “In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not.”

— Carl R. Rogers

64. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

65. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

66. “A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.”

— Carl R. Rogers

67. “Both the young and the old are almost completely useless in our modern society, and are made keenly aware of that uselessness. They have no place. They are private, isolated – and hopeless.”

— Carl R. Rogers

68. “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.”

— Carl R. Rogers

69. “No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.”

— Carl R. Rogers

70. “I have come to recognize that the reason I devote myself to research, and to the building of theory, is to satisfy a need for perceiving order and meaning, a subjective need which exists in me.”

— Carl R. Rogers

71. “You can’t possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.”

— Carl R. Rogers

72. “I have come to feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward.”

— Carl R. Rogers

73. “To be responsibly self-directing means that one chooses – and then learns from the consequences. So clients find this a sobering but exciting kind of experience.”

— Carl R. Rogers

74. “Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.”

— Carl R. Rogers

75. “I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.”

— Carl R. Rogers

76. “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 of effort.”

— Carl R. Rogers

77. “I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.”

— Carl R. Rogers

78. “The strongest force in our universe is not overriding power, but love.”

— Carl R. Rogers

79. “To understand another person’s thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for him, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return – this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all too rare.”

— Carl R. Rogers

80. “Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.”

— Carl R. Rogers

81. “If the time comes when our culture tires of the endless homicidal feuds, despairs of the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with the half-lives that its members are living – only then will our culture seriously look for alternatives.”

— Carl R. Rogers

82. “I observe first that characteristically the client shows a tendency to move away, hesitantly and fearfully, from a self that he is not. In other words even though there maybe no recognition of what he might be moving toward, he is moving away from something. And of course in so doing he is beginning to define, however negatively, what he is.”

— Carl R. Rogers

83. “I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself. To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing, but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it.”

— Carl R. Rogers

84. “I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.”

— Carl R. Rogers

85. “Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways.”

— Carl R. Rogers

86. “We cannot deal with the increasing maldistribution of wealth, the increasing alienation of millions, or the lack of a unified purpose and goal by increasing the efficiency of production, increasing the automation of industry, accelerating our technology, or increasing our reliance on the profit motives of multinational corporations.”

— Carl R. Rogers

87. “When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.”

— Carl R. Rogers

88. “To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process.”

— Carl R. Rogers

89. “I would like to make it very plain that these are learnings which have significance for me. I do not know whether they would hold true for you. I have no desire to present them as a guide for anyone else. Yet I have found that when another person has been willing to tell me something of his inner directions this has been of value to me, if only in sharpening my realization that my directions are different.”

— Carl R. Rogers

90. “I would prefer my experiences in communication to have a growth-promoting effect, both on me and on the other, and I should like to avoid those communication experiences in which both I and the other person feel diminished.”

— Carl R. Rogers

91. “The intolerant “true believer” is a menace to any field, yet I suspect each one of us finds traces of that person in ourself.”

— Carl R. Rogers

92. “Small wonder that we prefer to approach therapy with many rigid preconceptions. We feel we must bring order to it. We can scarcely dare to hope that we can discover order in it.”

— Carl R. Rogers

93. “Can I freely permit this staff member or my son or my daughter to become a separate person with ideas, purposes, and values which may not be identical with my own?”

— Carl R. Rogers

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

— Carl R. Rogers

95. “One of the most satisfying feelings I know – and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person – comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it.”

— Carl R. Rogers

96. “With the price of life these days, you’ve got to get everything for free you can.”

— Carl R. Rogers

97. “Learning of all kinds goes on best, lasts best, and tends to lead itself on more when it grows out of a real focus of interest in the learner.”

— Carl R. Rogers

98. “Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future.”

— Carl R. Rogers

99. “Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.”

— Carl R. Rogers

100. “There is no organised encounter group. There is simply a freedom of expression – of feelings and thoughts – on any personally relevant issue.”

— Carl R. Rogers