54 Quotes by Erik Erikson

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

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

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.

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