“Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”
— Carl Rogers
“I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.”
— Carl Rogers
“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
— Carl Rogers
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can 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
“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. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.”
— Carl Rogers
“The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.”
— Carl Rogers
“I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing.”
— Carl Rogers
“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.”
— Carl Rogers
“What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly.”
— 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
“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 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
“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 Rogers