Frederick Salomon Perls Quotes

Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.

If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence-the very moment you get in touch with yourself-growth begins, integration begins.

I believe that any single dream contains the essential message about our existence.

We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.

Humans don't really improve on our own functioning, we only interfere with it, distort it, and disguise it.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.

Don't push the river, it flows by itself.

I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.

I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I. And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.

If you are bored, you are not paying attention.

So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second

Teaching means to show a person that something is possible.

Learning is the discovery that something is possible

Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do yours.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.

There's always a possibility of richer maturation - of taking more and more responsibility for yourself and for your life ... And this is what I hope ... to make you understand how much you gain by taking re-sponsibility for every emotion, every movement you make, every thought you have ... We touch each other by honestly being what we are, not intentionally making contact.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference.