Erik Erikson Quotes

26 quotes in 372 categories

• Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters - where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they…
• Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being…
• 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…
• Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.
• Personality, too, is destiny.
• 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…
• Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.
• 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…
• Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
• Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must…
• The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.
• We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.
• I am what survives of me.
• In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
• He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy…
• Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was…
• 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…
• The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.
• 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.
• Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep,…

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