Milton H. Erickson Quotes

Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.

People do not come into therapy to change their past but their future.

Every person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint.There are no two people alike. No two people who understand the same sentence the same way... So in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.

You can't effect the cards that you are dealt, but you can determine how you play them.

Life isn't something you can give an answer to today. You should enjoy the process of waiting, the process of becoming what you are. There is nothing more delightful than planting flower seeds and not knowing what kind of flowers are going to come up.

Allow yourself to see what you don’t allow yourself to see.

Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.

A goal without a date is just a dream.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

The most important thing in changing human behavior is the person's motivation.

Patients are patients because they are out of rapport with their own unconscious... Patients are people who have had too much programming - so much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves.

The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward and honest. It hasn't got all of this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish It is direct and free.

Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.

You don't take insults. You leave them with the insulter.

People who accomplish a great many things are people who have freed themselves from biases. These are the creative people.

The unconscious works without your knowledge and that is the way it prefers.

Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino.

You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn.

You see, we don't know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there. "I don't know what I'm building but I'm going to enjoy building it and when I get through building it I'll know what it is." In doing psychotherapy you impress this upon patients. You don't know what a baby is going to become. Therefore, you take good care of it until it becomes what it will.

What is easiest to see is often overlooked.

Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.

You can pretend anything and master it.

There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.

You can trust the unconscious.