Erik Erikson > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Erik Erikson

“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.”
― Erik Erikson

“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.”
― Erik Erikson

“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.”
― Erik Erikson

“We all dimly feel that our transient historical identity is the only chance in all eternity to be alive as a somebody in a here and a now. We, therefore, dread the possibility, of which we are most aware when deeply young or very old, that at the end we may find that we have lived the wrong life or not really lived at all.”
― Erik Erikson

“Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.”
― Erik Erikson

“человек выживает только тогда, когда традиционное детское воспитание снабжает его совестью, которая будет руководить им, не подавляя, и которая настолько тверда и одновременно гибка, чтобы приспосабливаться к превратностям исторической эпохи.”
― Erik Erikson

“Why do we think the face has turned away which only looked elsewhere?”
― Erik Erikson

“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.”
― Erik Erikson

“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.”
― Erik 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 Erikson

“In the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
― Erik Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle / Pschological Issues [In Japanese Language]

“Behind every man's insistence on masculine superiority there is an age-old envy of women.”
― Erik Erikson