Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

- Carl Rogers

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

- Carl Rogers

"What is most personal is most universal."

- Carl Rogers

"A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits."

- Carl Rogers

"Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?"

- Carl Rogers

"I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful."

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

"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 Rogers

"I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. 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. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming."

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

""Life really does begin at 40. Up until then, you are just doing research.""

- Carl Rogers

"The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."

- Carl Rogers

"What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly."

- Carl Rogers

"I'm not perfect... But I'm enough."

- Carl Rogers

"Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research."

- Carl Rogers

"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 Rogers

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

- Carl Rogers

"When I look at the world, I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic."

- Carl Rogers

"You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat."

- Carl Rogers

"If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual."

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

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

- Carl Rogers

"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?"

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

"When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another."

- Carl Rogers

"To be with another in this [empathic] way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another's world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish."

- Carl Rogers

"Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong - yet subtle and gentle - way of being."

- Carl Rogers

"The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust."

- Carl Rogers

"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."

- Carl Rogers

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"There is direction but there is no destination."

- Carl Rogers

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"Life really does begin at 40. Up until then, you are just doing research."

- Carl Rogers