Quotes from Erik H. Erikson

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

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.

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

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

Anxieties are diffuse states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery.

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.

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.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding." ~

No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be.

modern times, of course, political ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader multiplied on a thousand banners.

And yet the sternness sometimes displayed in your letters to your children bespeaks an appalling sense of doom, as if they, as the product of your sin, had no chance for salvation except as partners in your renunciation.

If some busybody were to cross-examine me on the chapters already written, he could probably shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic's cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up [make the world laugh by revealing] the hollowness of many of my pretensions.

Nevertheless, it is true that the first discipline encountered by a young man is the one he must somehow identify with unless he chooses to remain unidentified in his years of need. The discipline he happens to encounter, however, may turn out to be poor ideological fare; poor in view of what, as an individual, he has not yet derived from his childhood problems, and poor in view of the irreversible decisions which begin to crowd in on him.

and landowning class in their economic and political fortresses could well afford to be open-minded in order to keep the influx of Indian labor coming.

Within two weeks Gandhi and his friends (old Muslim merchants in carriages and young Christians on foot) had collected ten thousand signatures which were affixed to a petition sent to the Colonial Secretary.

The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.

None was to touch any one's property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.

And as was Gandhi's wont, he would not only insist on hygienic and social restraints but would preach to this group the basic ethical rules for the forthcoming march: None was to touch any one's property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.