“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.” – Carl Rogers
42 Carl Rogers Quotes
- “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
2. “I’m not perfect, but I’m enough.”
3. “What is most personal is most universal.”
4. “What is most personal is most general.”
5. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
6. “I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.”
7. “You can’t possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.”
8. “Each man must resolve within himself issues for which his society previously took full responsibility.”
9. “Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”
10. “The only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture.”
Carl Rogers Quotes About Life
11. “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
12. “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.”
13. “Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”
14. “When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mould you, it feels damn good.”
15. “Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.”
16. “There is no organised encounter group. There is simply a freedom of expression – of feelings and thoughts – on any personally relevant issue.”
17. “I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.”
18. “What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.”
19. “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.”
20. “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.”
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21. “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.”
22. “I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.”
23. “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.”
24. “To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process.”
25. “Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.”
26. “I like to think of myself as a quiet revolutionary.”
27. “With the price of life these days, you’ve got to get everything for free you can.”
28. “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.”
29. “It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior.”
30. “It is so obvious when a person is not hiding behind a facade but is speaking from deep within himself.”
The Best Carl Rogers Quotes
31. “The concept of “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease.”
32. “if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself.”
33. “I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state.”
34. “Empathy is the listener’s effort to hear the other person deeply, accurately, and non-judgmentally. Empathy involves skillful reflective listening that clarifies and amplifies the person’s own experiencing and meaning, without imposing the listener’s own material.”
35. “I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.”
36. “I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.”
37. “In therapy the individual learns to recognize and express his feelings as his own feelings, not as a fact about another person.”
38. “I wanted to find a field in which I could be sure my freedom of thought would not be limited”
39. “The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction.”
40. “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.”
41. “When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.”
42. “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.”
Read More: Carl Rogers: Founder Of The Humanistic Approach To Psychology
Carl Rogers was an American psychologist who lived from January 8, 1902, to February 4, 1987, is credited with helping to establish both the humanistic and client-centered schools of psychology. Rogers is regarded as one of the pioneers of psychotherapy research and was given the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956 for his groundbreaking work.