List of Erik Erikson Quotes

Mans True Taproots Are Nourished In The Sequence Of Generations, And He Loses His Taproots In Disrupted Developmental Time, Not In Abandoned Localities.

In America Nature Is Autocratic, Saying, "i Am Not Arguing, I Am Telling You.

In The Evaluation Of The Dominant Moods Of Any Historical Period It Is Important To Hold Fast To The Fact That There Are Always Islands Of Self-sufficient Order — On Farms And In Castles, In Homes, Studies, And Cloisters — Where Sensible People Manage To Live Relatively Lusty And Decent Lives: As Moral As They Must Be, As Free As They May Be, And As Masterly As They Can Be. If We Only Knew It, This Elusive Arrangement Is Happiness.

If One Sees The Personality Not As An Apparatus That Is Essentially Constructed By The Time Childhood Is Over, But As Always In Its Essence Developing, Then Life At 25 Or 30 Or At The Gateway To Middle Age Will Stimulate Its Own Intrigue, Surprise, And Exhilaration Of Discovery.

You Can Actively Flee, Then, And You Can Actively Stay Put.

The Growing Child Must Derive A Vitalizing Sense Of Reality From The Awareness That His Individual Way Of Mastering Experience (his Ego Synthesis) Is A Successful Variant Of A Group Identity And Is In Accord With Its Space-time And Life Plan.

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.

Do Not Mistake A Child For His Symptom.

These Same Experiences Make Of The Sequence Of Life Cycles A Generational Cycle, Irrevocably Binding Each Generation To Those That Gave It Life And To Those For Whose Life It Is Responsible. Thus, Reconciling Lifelong Generativity And Stagnation Involves The Elder In A Review Of His Or Her Own Years Of Active Responsibility For Nurturing The Next Generations, And Also In An Integration Of Earlier-life Experiences Of Caring And Of Self-concern In Relation To Previous Generations.

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.

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 Know Where He Is Not Free; He Does Not Recognize His Native Autocrats When He Sees Them.

When Established Identities Become Outworn Or Unfinished Ones Threaten To Remain Incomplete, Special Crises Compel Men To Wage Holy Wars, By The Cruelest Means, Against Those Who Seem To Question Or Threaten Their Unsafe Ideological Bases.