Milton H. Erickson Quotes

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.

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

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

Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino.

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

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.

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

You can trust the unconscious.

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

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

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

You can pretend anything and master it.

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

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

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

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

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

The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

A goal without a date is just a dream.

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.

Trance is a natural everyday experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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