Milton H. Erickson Quotes

Allow yourself to see what you don’t allow yourself to see.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

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

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

Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.

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

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

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

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

A goal without a date is just a dream.

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

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

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

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

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

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

Trance is a natural everyday experience.

How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?

There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.

What is easiest to see is often overlooked.

You can pretend anything and master it.

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

You can trust the unconscious.

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

Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino.

Little is really known of the actual potentials of human functioning.

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

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

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.

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.

The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?

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

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.

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