On Becoming a Person Quotes

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“What is most personal is most universal.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 R Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“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 R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“the more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where he recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, lies within himself.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.”
― Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning,”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“it is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances 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. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“In my deepest contacts with individuals in therapy, even those whose troubles are most disturbing, whose behavior has been most anti-social, whose feelings seem most abnormal, I find this to be true. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which they are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as positive, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Maslow might be speaking of clients I have known when he says, “self-actualized people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may be for other people.” (4, p. 214)”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“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.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good painters do not paint like that.' But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, 'Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this.' Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that 'good writers do not write like this.' But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward some one else's conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy