On Becoming a Person

Quotes

1. What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationshipto him. Then perhaps he can be what he is, openly and without fear.

   p. 66

2. 

   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 in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.

   p. 23

3. 

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

   p. 351

4. 

   ... 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.

5. 

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

   p. 281

6. 

   If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

7. 

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

   p. 11

That’s all the quotes.

7 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more