Erik Erikson Quotes

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

When you're physically growing up, you develop emotionally with that.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

You actually do confront your dark side, your impulses, or your feelings of sibling rivalry in Cinderella or whatever. You admit that they exist and then you work through them and conquer them and come out living happily ever after having learned something. That's one reason why the fairy tales keep having traction and meaning.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Our relationship is complicated by the fact that I am emotionally retarded.

Men are but children of a larger growth.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personalresponse from their infants.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

In this world, man has two significant possessions: intelligence and emotion. These two possessions govern our day-to-day life. But very often we see that emotion (ego) gets the upper hand in our life. We know that even if someone is extremely intelligent, when his emotion comes to the fore it will devour him. He is compelled to do what his emotion asks him to do.

The world is ruled, and the destiny of civilization is established, by the human emotions.

I am learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy.

Love is a great master. It teaches us to be what we never were.

The drive of the story is sort of hinted at the beginning, is Joy and Sadness and those two characters. Especially Joy starting to understand that there's more to life than being happy. And so that's based on real life observations and things that we've learned as adults.

Be patient with the boys - you are dealing with soul-stuff.

Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them.

Children have almost an intuitive discernment between the maxims you bring forward for their use, and those by which you direct your own conduct.

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.