Erik H. Erikson > Quotes

“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 remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others." ~ Erik Erikson”
― Erik H. Erikson

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

“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“Anxieties are diffuse states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society

“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.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“A creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will; he must court sickness, failure, or insanity in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world's outworn fundaments and make place for a new one.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society

“There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding." ~”
― Erik H. Erikson

“modern times, of course, political ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader multiplied on a thousand banners.”
― Erik H. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed: A Review

“Nevertheless, it is true that the first discipline encountered by a young man is the one he must somehow identify with unless he chooses to remain unidentified in his years of need. The discipline he happens to encounter, however, may turn out to be poor ideological fare; poor in view of what, as an individual, he has not yet derived from his childhood problems, and poor in view of the irreversible decisions which begin to crowd in on him.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

“No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“An infant of two or three months will smile at even half a painted dummy face, if that half of the face is fully represented and has at least two clearly defined points or circles for eyes; more the infant does not need, but he will not smile for less. The infant's instinctive smile seems to have exactly that purpose which is its crowning effect, namely, that the adult feels recognized, and in return expresses recognition in the form of loving and providing.”
― Erik Homburger Erikson

“The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“The first of these is what we may call a polarization of sexual differences (V.6), i.e., the elaboration of a particular ratio of masculinity and femininity in line with identity development. Some of our patients suffer more lastingly and malignantly from a state not uncommon in a milder and transient form in all adolescence: the young person does not feel himself clearly to be a member of one sex or the other, which may make him the easy victim of the pressure emanating, for example, from homosexual cliques, for to some persons it is more bearable to be typed as something, anything, than to endure drawn-out bisexual confusion”
― Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis

“And yet the sternness sometimes displayed in your letters to your children bespeaks an appalling sense of doom, as if they, as the product of your sin, had no chance for salvation except as partners in your renunciation.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“If some busybody were to cross-examine me on the chapters already written, he could probably shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up [make the world laugh by revealing] the hollowness of many of my pretensions.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“...there is something Russian about this particular use of the eye as an aggressive and defensive weapon. In Russian literature there is endless variation in the use of the eye as a soulful receptor, as an avid grasper, and as the very organ for mutual soulful surrender. In regard to the great models of political and literary life, however, the emphasis is on the eye as an incorruptible instrument for the manipulation of the future. Gorky's description of Tolstoy is typical: 'With sharp eyes, from which neither a single pebble nor a single thought could hide itself, he looked, measured, tested, compared.' Or again, his eyes are 'screwed up as though straining to look into the future'.
Equally typical is Trotsky's description of Lenin:
When Lenin, his left eye narrowed, receives a wireless containing a speech he resembles a devilishly clever peasant who does not let himself be confused by any words, or deluded by any phrases. That is highly intensified peasant shrewdness, lifted to the point of inspiration.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society

“The law, of course, reflected the sense of threat shared by the majority of whites and had long since begun to”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“and landowning class in their economic and political fortresses could well afford to be open-minded in order to keep the influx of Indian labor coming.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“None was to touch any one’s property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“And as was Gandhi’s wont, he would not only insist on hygienic and social restraints but would preach to this group the basic ethical rules for the forthcoming march: None was to touch any one’s property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“Within two weeks Gandhi and his friends (old Muslim merchants in carriages and young Christians on foot) had collected ten thousand signatures which were affixed to a petition sent to the Colonial Secretary.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“For both Indians and whites were outnumbered ten to one by hundreds of thousands of Natal Zulus. The Indians, of course, considered themselves to be closer to the whites than to the blacks, both as descendants of an ancient civilization and as adherents to three world religions. But to the whites they were nonwhites and therefore a cultural and political wedge for the masses of blacks. And as everywhere, it was the poorer whites, the petty white traders, and even white labor, whose fears were most vociferous, while the wealthy and landowning class in their economic and political fortresses could well afford to be open-minded in order to keep the influx of Indian labor coming. The law, of course, reflected the sense of threat shared by the majority of whites and had long since begun to control all nonwhites in a web of demeaning police ordinances.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

“The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.”
― Erik H. Erikson