Quotes from Milton H. Erickson

The unconscious works without your knowledge and that is the way it prefers.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.

Life is lived in the present and directed toward a future.

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...

You can trust the unconscious.

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.

I have no intention of dying. In fact, that will be the last thing I do!

you say the right thing at the right moment. But you have no business knowing it ahead of time because as surely as you know it consciously, you start to improve on it and ruin it.

La terapia es como una bola de nieve que se deja caer desde la cima de una montaña. A medida que rueda aumenta y aumenta de tamaño y se convierte en una avalancha que se amolda a la forma de la montaña.

You always call it hindsight. Two weeks too late to think of the right retort to make. You lead with your unconscious; you make that retort immediately... Trust your unconscious; it knows more than you do.

People who accomplish a great many things are people who have freed themselves from biases. These are the creative people.

As for my dignity... the hell with my dignity. I will get along alright in this world. I don't have to be dignified, professional.

Trance is a natural everyday experience.

People do not come into therapy to change their past but their future.

Emphasis should be placed more on what the patient does in the present and will do in the future than on a mere understanding of why some long-past event occurred.

A goal without a date is just a dream.