Carl Rogers: As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best...

It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.

Carl Rogers

confusion business healing

There are as many "real worlds" as there are people!

Carl Rogers

real life people

I prize the privilege of being alone.

Carl Rogers

prize privilege solitude

The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.

Carl Rogers

empathy emotional states

I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with him; it enriches my life. It is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships.

Carl Rogers

personality believe people

We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood.

Carl Rogers

growing-knowledge loss mean

Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.

Carl Rogers

matter may attitude

So, as you can readily see from what I have said thus far, a creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic, nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship. It is important for me to provide it; it has been extremely important, especially at certain times in my life, to receive it. I feel that I have grown within myself when I have provided it; I am very sure that I have grown and been released and enhanced when I have received this kind of listening.

Carl Rogers

empathy creative listening

An empathic way of being can be learned from empathic persons. Perhaps the most important statement of all is that the ability to be accurately empathic is something which can be developed by training. Therapists, parents and teachers can be helped to become empathic. This is especially likely to occur if their teachers and supervisors are themselves individuals of sensitive understanding. It is most encouraging to know that this subtle, elusive quality, of utmost importance in therapy, is not something one is "born with", but can be learned, and learned most rapidly in an empathic climate.

Carl Rogers

empathy parent teacher

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Carl Rogers

unique essence art

It is that the individual has within him or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering the self-concept basic attitudes, and his or her self-directed behavior - and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided

Carl Rogers

understanding self attitude

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

despair war mean

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

mind feelings two

In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

Carl Rogers

congruence nervous process

When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger.

Carl Rogers

empathy relax way

Learning of all kinds goes on best, lasts best, and tends to lead itself on more when it grows out of a real focus of interest in the learner.

Carl Rogers

focus real goes-on

Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle... knowledge exists primarily for use.

Carl Rogers

wagons rifles use

there is direction but there is no destination

Carl Rogers

destination

The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is most likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation.

Carl Rogers

discovery ideas art

One of the most revolutionary concepts to grow out of our clinical experience is the growing recognition that innermost core of man's nature - the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his 'animal nature' - is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic... He is realistically able to control himself, and he is incorrigibly socialized in his desires. There is no beast in man, there is only man in man.

Carl Rogers

animal men moving

As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.