Top 30 Frederick Salomon Perls Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

Featured in: Self-Esteem Quotes, Personality Quotes, Freedom Quotes, Different Quotes, Individuality Quotes

2. “Lose your mind and come to your senses.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

Featured in: Philosophy Quotes, Crazy Quotes

3. “Awareness in itself is healing.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

4. “Fear is excitement without the breath.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

5. “We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

6. “Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

7. “Anxiety is the gap between now and later.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

8. “If you are bored, you are not paying attention.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

9. “The person most in control is the person who can give up control.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

10. “Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

11. “Those that fight don’t listen, those that listen don’t fight.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

12. “If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence-the very moment you get in touch with yourself-growth begins, integration begins.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

13. “I believe that any single dream contains the essential message about our existence.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

14. “Teaching means to show a person that something is possible.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

15. “To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

16. “I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

17. “You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

18. “The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man knows he’s playing.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

19. “It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

20. “I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

21. “Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

22. “Humans don’t really improve on our own functioning, we only interfere with it, distort it, and disguise it.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

23. “I wonder why people use only walls for hanging pictures.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

24. “So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

25. “You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

26. “Alimentan su computadora, el intelecto. Y el intelecto es la punta de la inteligencia. Un estorbo en la vida.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

27. “La angustia es siempre resultado del alejarse del ahora.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

28. “By remaining alert in the centre, we can acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurrence and completing an incomplete half.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

29. “Man transcends himself only via his true nature, not through ambition and artificial goals.”

— Frederick Salomon Perls

30. “We must, for instance, face the fact that we blandly commit what to the experimentalist is the most unpardonable of sins: we include the experimenter in the experiment!”

— Frederick Salomon Perls