106 Quotes by 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 me.

Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.

I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality... become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.

Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.

If I were to search for the central core of difficulty in people as I have come to know them, it is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, regarding themselves as worthless and unlovable.

Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself.

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.

To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."

It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.