Erik Erikson Quotes

I don't expect anything from anybody. When you grow old... Your days are gone; it is part of life.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

You can't be scared of death. When that time comes, it comes.

You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Treat Death as it treats us: with utter indifference.

Life is the game that must be played, this truth at least, good friends, we know; so live and laugh, nor be dismayed as one by one the phantoms go.

These trees and these old people have one thing in common, they're both going in the ground soon!

Death is an art, you know.

I've become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because... I've been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

When I was young, I used to be very frightened of getting older and of death. Now, I'm more resigned to the inevitability.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

I'm hyper-focused on loss. But I know it's just the impermanence of being here.

I think that the older I get, the more I play, you realise when it's your time.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

I guess it's about getting older. I know that I'm going to lose people that I love - I'm going to die myself - so everything seems to be getting somehow sweet and more important and more special and more humbling and more challenging and more terrifying all at the same time.

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.

What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.