Erik Erikson Quotes

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Without a musket to raise, a barricade to storm, a flag to wave, the question hit me in the face like the cold air: 'Who am I?'

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I know who Jack Whittaker is. And some days I don't like who I am.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

I think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

Can't get away from your own self.

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.