Erik Erikson quotes

Erik Erikson was a German-American psychologist, renowned for his work on psychosocial development. His theory of the eight stages of human development profoundly influenced psychology and education. He emphasized the importance of identity and coined the term "identity crisis." Here are 19 of his quotes:

Doubt is the brother of shame.

Erik Erikson

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

Erik Erikson

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.

Erik Erikson

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

Erik Erikson

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

Erik Erikson

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

Erik Erikson

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.

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

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

Erik Erikson

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.

Erik Erikson

Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

Erik Erikson

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.

Erik Erikson

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 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.

Erik Erikson

All world-images are apt to become corrupt when left to ecclesiastic bureaucracies. But this does not make the formation of world-images expendable.

Erik Erikson

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 Erikson

All world-images are apt to become corrupt when left to ecclesiastic bureaucracies. But this does not make the formation of world-images expendable. And I can only repeat that we deny the remnants of old-world images at our own risk, because we do not overcome them by declaring them - with all the righteousness of skepticism - something of a secret sin. They are not less powerful for being denied.

Erik Erikson