Erik Erikson

“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.”

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

“We are what we love.”

“I am what survives of me.”

“A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.”

“We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.”

“The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'”

“The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.”

“Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.”

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

“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 rules for an undivided mankind.”

“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.”

“You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.”

“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, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.”

“Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.”

“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.”

“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 the eyes of the world.”

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

“Doubt is the brother of shame.”

“The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.”