Milton H. Erickson famous quotes

06-24-2025

Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Happiness #Pain #Responsibility
Allow yourself to see what you donâ€™t allow yourself to see.
-- Milton H. Erickson
A goal without a date is just a dream.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Dream #Goal #Just A Dream
Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Change #Insight
The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward and honest. It hasn't got all of this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish It is direct and free.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Simple #Mind #Adults
Every person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint.There are no two people alike. No two people who understand the same sentence the same way... So in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Unique #Two #People
Life isn't something you can give an answer to today. You should enjoy the process of waiting, the process of becoming what you are. There is nothing more delightful than planting flower seeds and not knowing what kind of flowers are going to come up.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Flower #Knowing #Giving
You see, we don't know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there You don't know what the baby is going to become. Therefore, you wait and take good care of it until it becomes what it will.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Baby #Goal #Waiting
Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Confused #Learning #Action
You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Mean #Hypnosis #Climate
The unconscious mind works without your knowledge and that is the way it prefers.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Mind #Way #Unconscious Mind
People who accomplish a great many things are people who have freed themselves from biases. These are the creative people.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#People #Creative #Great Men
I have no intention of dying. In fact, it will be the last thing I do!
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Positivity #Dying #Lasts
When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Imperfect #Wanted
There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Should #Unfinished #Incomplete
What is easiest to see is often overlooked.
-- Milton H. Erickson
Patients are patients because they are out of rapport with their own unconscious... Patients are people who have had too much programming - so much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Self #People #Too Much
Shut up, sit in that chair there and go into a deep trance!
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Silence #Shut Up #Chairs
The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Book #Reading #Knowing
We always translate the other person's language into our own language.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Language #Translate #Persons
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.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#World #Dignity #Hell
The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Ego #Conscious #Unconscious
Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Difficulty
I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Confidence #Way #Looks
Dreams, puns, elisions, plays on words and similar tricks that we ordinarily think of as frivolous, all play a surprising and somewhat disconcerting role in the communication of important and serious feelings.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Dream #Communication #Thinking
Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Way #Patient #Therapy
Life is lived in the present and directed toward a future.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Life Is
How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Appreciation #Appreciate #Mind
You can trust the unconscious.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Consciousness #Unconscious
Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Unique #Needs #Bed
You can pretend anything and master it.
-- Milton H. Erickson

#Masters

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