I am what survives of me.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

Doubt is the brother of shame.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

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.

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

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.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.

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.

Hope is the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages which mark the beginning of existence. Hope is the ontogenetic basis of faith, and is nourished by the adult faith which pervades patterns of care.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.