Top 35 Milton H. Erickson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A goal without a date is just a dream.”

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

3. “Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.”

— Milton H. Erickson

4. “Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.”

— Milton H. Erickson

5. “Allow yourself to see what you don’t allow yourself to see.”

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

7. “The most important thing in changing human behavior is the person’s motivation.”

— Milton H. Erickson

8. “What is easiest to see is often overlooked.”

— Milton H. Erickson

9. “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

10. “You can pretend anything and master it.”

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

12. “You can’t effect the cards that you are dealt, but you can determine how you play them.”

— Milton H. Erickson

13. “Trance is a natural everyday experience.”

— Milton H. Erickson

14. “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

15. “I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...”

— Milton H. Erickson

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

20. “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

21. “You don’t take insults. You leave them with the insulter.”

— Milton H. Erickson

22. “You can’t learn to swim on a piano bench.”

— Milton H. Erickson

23. “You can trust the unconscious.”

— Milton H. Erickson

24. “We always translate the other person’s language into our own language.”

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

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

— Milton H. Erickson

27. “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

28. “The conscious ego cannot tell the unconscious what to do?”

— Milton H. Erickson

29. “How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?”

— Milton H. Erickson

30. “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

31. “Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino.”

— Milton H. Erickson

32. “Don’t ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.”

— Milton H. Erickson

33. “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

34. “Life’s difficulties are merely necessary roughage.”

— Milton H. Erickson

35. “Shut up, sit in that chair there and go into a deep trance!”

— Milton H. Erickson

36. “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

37. “When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else’s imperfect knowledge.”

— Milton H. Erickson

38. “You always call it hindsight. Two weeks too late to think of the right retort to make. You lead with your unconscious; you make that retort immediately... Trust your unconscious; it knows more than you do.”

— Milton H. Erickson