Erik Erikson Quotes

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

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

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

You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their accruing ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in their culture.

If life is to be sustained, hope must remain.

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. Others have called this deepest quality confidence, and I have referred to trust as the earliest positive psychosocial attitude, but if life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

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

The strengths a young person finds in adults at this time-their willingness to let him experiment, their eagerness to confirm him at his best, their consistency in correcting his excesses, and the guidance they give him-will codetermine whether or not he eventually makes order out of necessary inner confusion and applies himself to the correction of disordered conditions. He needs freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that he cannot, in fact, make a choice.

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

When we looked at the life cycle in our 40s, we looked to old people for wisdom. At 80, though, we look at other 80-year-olds to see who got wise and who not. Lots of old people don't get wise, but you don't get wise unless you age.

Personality, too, is destiny.

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.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

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

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

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

Doubt is the brother of shame.

The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.