Erik Erikson

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

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

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 once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

We are what we love.

Doubt is the brother of shame.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am what survives of me.

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.

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.