Milton H. Erickson Quotes - Page 2

Emphasis should be placed more on what the patient does in the present and will do in the future than on a mere understanding of why some long-past event occurred.

How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?

We always translate the other person's language into our own language.

Trance is a natural everyday experience.

When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.

I have no intention of dying. In fact, it will be the last thing I do!

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way.

Life is lived in the present and directed toward a future.

You can't learn to swim on a piano bench.

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them.

The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?

Dreams, puns, elisions, plays on words and similar tricks that we ordinarily think of as frivolous, all play a surprising and somewhat disconcerting role in the communication of important and serious feelings.

As for my dignity... the hell with my dignity. I will get along alright in this world. I don't have to be dignified, professional.

Little is really known of the actual potentials of human functioning.

Shut up, sit in that chair there and go into a deep trance!