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 RogersRead
Experience is, for me, the highest authority.
Interpretation
Experience is the most important teacher and guide in life.
In this quote, Carl Rogers emphasizes the value of personal experience as the ultimate source of knowledge and understanding. He suggests that experiences shape our insights and decisions more than theoretical knowledge or external authorities, highlighting the importance of reflecting on our own lived moments to gain wisdom.
In practice
During a motivational speech about learning, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of personal experience in education.
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.
The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust.
I prize the privilege of being alone.
Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.
I have come to think that one of the most satisfying experiences I know β and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person β is just fully to appreciate this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset.
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
This is what I am learning, at 82 years old: the main thing is to be in love with the search for truth.
Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice. Therefore the Master remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his heart. Because he has given up helping, he is people's greatest help. True words seem paradoxical.
However impressed we may be with NVC concepts, it is only through practice and application that our lives are transformed.
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.
You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.
Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at meanspirited roadhouses.
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