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When we looked at the life cycle in our 40s, we looked to old people for wisdom. At 80, though, we look at other 80-year-olds to see who got wise and who not. Lots of old people don't get wise, but you don't get wise unless you age.

Erik Erikson

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Erik Erikson
Age: 91 †
Born: 1902
Born: June 15
Died: 1994
Died: May 12
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
University Teacher
Frankfurt/Main
Erik Homburger Erikson
Erik H. Erikson
Age
Cycles
Look
Lots
Looks
Looked
Years
Unless
Life
Wise
People
Wisdom
Year
Olds
Though
Cycle

More quotes by Erik Erikson

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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.
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Doubt is the brother of shame.
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Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.
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The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.
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The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.
Erik Erikson
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You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.
Erik Erikson
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The playing adult steps sideward into another reality the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.
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Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
Erik Erikson
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The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.
Erik Erikson
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If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.
Erik Erikson
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Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.
Erik Erikson
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Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. Others have called this deepest quality confidence, and I have referred to trust as the earliest positive psychosocial attitude, but if life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.
Erik Erikson
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Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.
Erik Erikson
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There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.
Erik Erikson
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The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.
Erik Erikson
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Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.
Erik Erikson
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In America nature is autocratic, saying, I am not arguing, I am telling you.
Erik Erikson
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Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Erik Erikson
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You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.
Erik Erikson
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Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.
Erik Erikson