34 Quotes by Erik H. Erikson

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one’s self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

If life is to be sustained, hope must remain...

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

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

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.

Hope is the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages which mark the beginning of existence. Hope is the ontogenetic basis of faith, and is nourished by the adult faith which pervades patterns of care.

Doubt is the brother of shame.