Top 120 Carl R. Rogers Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.”

— Carl R. Rogers

102. “Change threatens, and its possibility creates frightened, angry people. They are found in their purest essence on the extreme right, but in all of us there is some fear of process, of change.”

— Carl R. Rogers

103. “Each man must resolve within himself issues for which his society previously took full responsibility.”

— Carl R. Rogers

104. “He is learning that the feelings which exist are good enough to live by. They do not have to be coated with a veneer.”

— Carl R. Rogers

105. “We live by a perceptual “map” which is never reality itself.”

— Carl R. Rogers

106. “It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function.”

— Carl R. Rogers

107. “Perhaps partly because of the troubling business of being struggled over, I have come to value highly the privilege of getting away, of being alone. It has seemed to me that my most fruitful periods of work are the times when I have been able to get completely away from what others think, from professional expectations and daily demands, and gain perspective on what I am doing.”

— Carl R. Rogers

108. “I like to think of myself as a quiet revolutionary.”

— Carl R. Rogers

109. “I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.”

— Carl R. Rogers

110. “The audience sat back, relaxed in their chairs, awaiting the expected mellow retrospective of a revered septuagenarian. Instead, Rogers rocked them with a series of challenges. He urged school psychologists not to content themselves merely with treating students damaged by an obsolete and irrelevant educational system but to change the system, to participate in designing an educational experience that would liberate the students’ curiosity and enhance the joy of learning.”

— Carl R. Rogers

111. “It was found in practice that when the examinations were conducted in a spirit which led up to conclusions which were bits of advice, often no action was taken; whereas by leaving it to spontaneity in the individual and to his own sense of responsibility, action is taken in the overwhelming majority of cases.”

— Carl R. Rogers

112. “I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.”

— Carl R. Rogers

113. “If it is possible genuinely to meet and discover each other as persons, actually to empathize with and understand both the cultural beliefs and political views of each other –then I think the obscured future may be penetrated with some clear rays of light that we may realistically hope for a better world.”

— Carl R. Rogers

114. “It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior.”

— Carl R. Rogers

115. “From what I have been saying, I trust it is clear that when I can permit realness in myself or sense it or permit it in another, I am very satisfied. When I cannot permit it in myself or fail to permit it in another, I am very distressed.”

— Carl R. Rogers

116. “I find that this desire to be all of oneself in each moment – all the richness and complexity, with nothing hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself – this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy. I do not need to say that this is a difficult, and in its absolute sense an impossible goal. Yet one of the most evident trends in clients is to move toward becoming all of the complexity of one’s changing self in each significant moment.”

— Carl R. Rogers

117. “The concept of “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease.”

— Carl R. Rogers

118. “Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.”

— Carl R. Rogers

119. “The conviction grows in me that we shall discover laws of personality and behavior which are as significant for human progress or human understanding as the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics.”

— Carl R. Rogers

120. “When the locus of evaluation is seen as residing in the expert, it would appear that the long-range social implications are in the direction of the social control of the many by the few.”

— Carl R. Rogers

121. “I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.”

— Carl R. Rogers

122. “The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy – man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.”

— Carl R. Rogers

123. “It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function. This must seem to some like a very strange direction in which to move. 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

124. “It is so obvious when a person is not hiding behind a facade but is speaking from deep within himself.”

— Carl R. Rogers

125. “To recognize that “I am the one who chooses” and “I am the one who determines the value of an experience for me” is both an invigoraring and a frightening realization.”

— Carl R. Rogers

126. “I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I’m going to just be me – rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.”

— Carl R. Rogers

127. “Can I “accept” a person’s anger at me as an authentic aspect of himself? Can I “accept” the person if his beliefs and values are different from mine?”

— Carl R. Rogers

128. “Man’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I.”

— Carl R. Rogers

129. “I found myself doing this same thing – playing a role of having greater certainty and greater competence than I really possess. I can’t tell you how disgusted with myself I felt as I realized what I was doing: I was not being me, I was playing a part.”

— Carl R. Rogers

130. “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 there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.”

— Carl R. Rogers

131. “There seems every reason to suppose that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships. Thus it seems reasonable to hypothesize that if the parent creates with his child a psychological climate such as we have described, then the child will become more self-directing, socialized, and mature.”

— Carl R. Rogers

132. “It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life.”

— Carl R. Rogers

133. “The best way I can state this aim of life, as I see it coming to light in my relationship with my clients, is to use the words of Soren Kierkegaar – “to be that self which one truly is.”

— Carl R. Rogers

134. “Clients seem to move toward more openly being a process, a fluidity, a changing. They are not disturbed to find that they are not the same from day to day, that they do not always hold the same feelings toward a given experience or person, that they are not always consistent. They are in flux, and seem more content to continue in this flowing current. The striving for conclusions and end states seems to diminish.”

— Carl R. Rogers

135. “One of the basic things which I was a long time in realizing, and which I am still learning, is that when an activity feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing. Put another way, I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.”

— Carl R. Rogers

136. “If awareness and conscious thought are seen as a part of life – not its master nor its opponent but an illumination of the developing process within the individual – then our total life can be the unified and unifying experience that is characteristic in nature.”

— Carl R. Rogers

137. “To discover that it is not devastating to accept the positive feeling from another, that it does not necessarily end in hurt, that it actually “feels good” to have another person with you in your struggles to meet life – this may be one of the most profound learnings encountered by the individual whether in therapy or not.”

— Carl R. Rogers