Great Throughts Treasury

"When present living is enough, I experience myself as being enough."

"Through finding and helping to develop my appropriate others, I discover and create the meaning of my life. And in caring for my appropriate others, in being in-place, I live the meaning of my life."

"In caring I experience the other as having potentialities and the need to grow. In helping the other grow I do not impose my own direction; rather, I allow the direction of the other's growth to guide what I do, to help determine how I am to respond."

"Caring has a way of ordering activities and values around itself; it become primary, and other activities and values become secondary."

"We are closest to people when we help them grow."

"You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think."

"Caring is the antithesis of simply using the other person to satisfy one’s own needs. The meaning of caring I want to suggest is not to be confused with such meanings as wishing well, liking, comforting and maintaining, or simply having an interest in what happens to another. Also, it is not an isolated feeling or a momentary relationship, nor is it simply wanting to care for some person. Caring, as helping another grow and actualize himself, is a process, a way of relating to someone that involves development."

"To care for another person, I must be able to understand him and his world as if I were inside it. I must be able to see, as it were, with his eyes what his world is like to him and how he sees himself. Instead of merely looking at him from outside, as if he were a specimen, I must be able to abide with him in his world, “going” into his world in order to sense from “inside” what life is like for him, what he is striving to be, and what he requires to grow….In being with the other, I do not lose myself. I retain my own identity and am aware of my own reactions to him and his world. Seeing his world as it appears to him does not mean having his reactions to it, and thus I am able to help him in his world….I do not have to be perplexed, for instance, to realize that he is perplexed, but because I “feel” his perplexity from the inside, I may be in a position to help him out of it."

"I am on call for my appropriate others. This does not simply mean I am available in the sense of being open and receptive, but corresponds to the way the person “off duty” may be reached and called in when he is needed. The man who cares for his appropriate others aspires to be always available to them when they really need him: the caring parent can be called away from something else to return to his child; the caring doctor can be reached by his patient….Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I am subject to being called on by my appropriate others."

"To care for another person is to help him/her grow and actualize him/herself. "