Milton Erickson Quotes

#1. A goal without a date is just a dream.

Milton H. Erickson

#2. 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

#3. You can pretend anything and master it.

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#5. We always translate the other person's language into our own language.

Milton H. Erickson

#6. 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

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

Milton H. Erickson

#8. The most important thing in changing human behavior is the person's motivation.

Milton H. Erickson

#9. How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?

Milton H. Erickson

#10. You can't effect the cards that you are dealt, but you can determine how you play them.

Milton H. Erickson

#11. Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

Milton H. Erickson

#12. 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

#13. You can teach a child the importance of pain by your behavior. You can also teach as child the importance of no pain by your behavior.

Milton H. Erickson

#14. What is easiest to see is often overlooked.

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#16. 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

#17. Shut up, sit in that chair there and go into a deep trance!

Milton H. Erickson

#18. Allow yourself to see what you don't allow yourself to see.

Milton H. Erickson

#19. You don't take insults. You leave them with the insulter.

Milton H. Erickson

#20. Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.

Milton H. Erickson

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#25. One's appreciation of, and understanding of the normal or the usual is requisite for any understanding of the abnormal or the unusual.

Milton H. Erickson

#26. Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino.

Milton H. Erickson

#27. 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

#28. Trance is a natural everyday experience.

Milton H. Erickson

#29. 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

#30. You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn.

Milton H. Erickson

#31. The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?

Milton H. Erickson

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.

Milton H. Erickson

#35. You can't learn to swim on a piano bench.

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#37. 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

#38. It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don't know what they can do.

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#40. You can trust the unconscious.

Milton H. Erickson

#41. 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.

Milton H. Erickson

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

Milton H. Erickson

#43. Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.

Milton H. Erickson