Erik Erikson Quotes

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.

If life is to be sustained, hope must remain.

Personality, too, is destiny.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.

Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Doubt is the brother of shame.

You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.

Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.

Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.

You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.

Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

In America nature is autocratic, saying, "I am not arguing, I am telling you.

Men have always shown a dim knowledge of their better potentialities by paying homage to those purest leaders who taught the simplest and most inclusive rules for an undivided mankind.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.

Genius as such can neither be explained nor treated away only at times its delay and inhibition and its perversion to destructive or self-destructive ends.