On Becoming a Person Quotes

“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

“It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to "fix things." As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex processes of life. SO I become less and less inclined to hurry to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be himself.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I would like to make it very plain that these are learnings which have significance for me. I do not know whether they would hold true for you. I have no desire to present them as a guide for anyone else. Yet I have found that when another person has been willing to tell me something of his inner directions this has been of value to me, if only in sharpening my realization that my directions are different.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

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

“letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“I have come to recognize that the reason I devote myself to research, and to the building of theory, is to satisfy a need for perceiving order and meaning, a subjective need which exists in me.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Acceptance does not mean much until it involves understanding. It is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre—it is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. This freedom is an important condition of the relationship. There is implied here a freedom to explore oneself at both conscious and unconscious levels, as rapidly as one can dare to embark on this dangerous quest. There is also a complete freedom from any type of moral or diagnostic evaluation, since all such evaluations are, I believe, always threatening. Thus the relationship which I have found helpful is characterized by a sort of transparency on my part, in which my real feelings are evident; by an acceptance of this other person as a separate person with value in his own right; and by a deep empathic understanding which enables me to see his private world through his eyes.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“To be responsibly self-directing means that one chooses—and then learns from the consequences. So clients find this a sobering but exciting kind of experience.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“To quote Maslow again regarding his self-actualizing individuals: “One does not complain about water because it is wet, nor about rocks because they are hard. . . . As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature both in himself and in others.” (4, p. 207) This acceptant attitude toward that which exists, I find developing in clients in therapy.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“Another learning which cost me much to recognize, can be stated in four words. The facts are friendly.
(...) Especially in our early investigations I can well remember the anxiety of waiting to see how the findings came out. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose we were mistaken in our views! (...) I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence that one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Man’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“To understand another person's thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for him, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return -- this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all too rare.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I observe first that characteristically the client shows a tendency to move away, hesitantly and fearfully, from a self that he is not. In other words even though there maybe no recognition of what he might be moving toward, he is moving away from something. And of course in so doing he is beginning to define, however negatively, what he is.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“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 feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“He is learning that the feelings which exist are good enough to live by. They do not have to be coated with a veneer”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“TRUST IN ONE’S ORGANISM A second characteristic of the persons who emerge from therapy is difficult to describe. It seems that the person increasingly discovers that his own organism is trustworthy, that it is a suitable instrument for discovering the most satisfying behavior in each immediate situation. If this seems strange, let me try to state it more fully. Perhaps it will help to understand my description if you think of the individual as faced with some existential choice: “Shall I go home to my family during vacation, or strike out on my own?” “Shall I drink this third cocktail which is being offered?” “Is this the person whom I would like to have as my partner in love and in life?” Thinking of such situations, what seems to be true of the person who emerges from the therapeutic process? To the extent that this person is open to all of his experience, he has access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior. He has knowledge of his own feelings and impulses, which are often complex and contradictory. He is freely able to sense the social demands, from the relatively rigid social “laws” to the desires of friends and family. He has access to his memories of similar situations, and the consequences of different behaviors in those situations. He has a relatively accurate perception of this external situation in all of its complexity. He is better able to permit his total organism, his conscious thought participating, to consider, weigh and balance each stimulus, need, and demand, and its relative weight and intensity. Out of this complex weighing and balancing he is able to discover that course of action which seems to come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation, long-range as well as immediate needs.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“I find that this desire to be all of oneself in each moment — all the richness and complexity, with nothing hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself — this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy. I do not need to say that this is a difficult, and in its absolute sense an impossible goal. Yet one of the most evident trends in clients is to move toward becoming all of the complexity of one’s changing self in each significant moment.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“Small wonder that we prefer to approach therapy with many rigid preconceptions. We feel we must bring order to it. We can scarcely dare to hope that we can discover order in it.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“He changes his perception of himself, becoming more realistic in his views of self. He becomes more like the person he wishes to be. He values himself more highly. He is more self-confident and self-directing. He has a better understanding of himself, becomes more open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience. He becomes more accepting in his attitudes toward others, seeing others as more similar to himself. In his behavior he shows similar changes. He is less frustrated by stress, and recovers from stress more quickly. He becomes more mature in his everyday behavior as this is observed by friends. He is less defensive, more adaptive, more able to meet situations creatively.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“The concept of “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“There seems every reason to suppose that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships. Thus it seems reasonable to hypothesize that if the parent creates with his child a psychological climate such as we have described, then the child will become more self-directing, socialized, and mature.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“To discover that it is not devastating to accept the positive feeling from another, that it does not necessarily end in hurt, that it actually “feels good” to have another person with you in your struggles to meet life —this may be one of the most profound learnings encountered by the individual whether in therapy or not.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I should like to point out one final characteristic of these individuals as they strive to discover and become themselves. It is that the individual seems to become more content to be a process rather than a product. When he enters the therapeutic relationship, the client is likely to wish to achieve some fixed state: he wants to reach the point where his problems are solved, or where he is effective in his work, or where his marriage is satisfactory. He tends, in the freedom of the therapeutic relationship to drop such fixed goals, and to accept a more satisfying realization that he is not a fixed entity, but a process of becoming.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“group of us felt that ideas were being fed to us, whereas we wished primarily to explore our own questions and doubts, and find out where they led.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“perhaps it is less important that a teacher cover the allotted amount of the curriculum, or use the most approved audio-visual devices, than that he be congruent, real, in his relation to his students.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Gradually my experience has forced me to conclude that the individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward toward maturity. In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential. It is evident in the capacity of the individual to understand those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction, an understanding which probes beneath his conscious knowledge of himself into those experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature. It shows itself in the tendency to reorganize his personality and his relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature. Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life, and is, in the last analysis, the tendency upon which all psychotherapy depends. It is the urge which is evident in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, to the extent that such activation enhances the organism or the self.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“I should like now to pull together into one statement the conditions of this general hypothesis, and the effects which are specified. If I can create a relationship characterized on my part: by a genuineness and transparency, in which I am my real feelings; by a warm acceptance of and prizing of the other person as a separate individual; by a sensitive ability to see his world and himself as he sees them; Then the other individual in the relationship: will experience and understand aspects of himself which previously he has repressed; will find himself becoming better integrated, more able to function effectively; will become more similar to the person he would like to be; will be more self-directing and self-confident; will become more of a person, more unique and more self-expressive; will be more understanding, more acceptant of others; will be able to cope with the problems of life more adequately and more comfortably.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy