Quotes by 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.”

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

Its 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, theyll be standing there beside you, with you.

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.

Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Genius as such can neither be explained nor treated away only at times its delay and inhibition and its perversion to destructive or self-destructive ends.

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.

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 dont get wise, but you dont get wise unless you age.

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.

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.