Eric Berne Quotations

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

A loser doesn't know what he'll do if he loses, but talks about what he'll do if he wins, and a winner doesn't talk about what he'll do if he wins, but knows what he'll do if he loses.

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Losers spend time explaining why they lost. Losers spend their lives thinking about what they're going to do. They rarely enjoy doing what they're doing.

Whatever you do, think of next morning's headlines.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others

A winner fulfills his contract with the world and with himself. That is, he sets out to do something, says that he is committed to doing it, and in the long run does it.

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours

Every man must, in a measure, be alone in the world. No heart was ever cast in the same mould as that which we bear within us.

Each person designs his own life, freedom gives him the power to carry out his own designs, and power gives the freedom to interfere with the designs of others.

No man is a hero to his wife's psychiatrist.

Love is nature's psychotherapy.

A healthy person goes 'Yes,' 'No,' and 'Whoopee!' An unhealthy person goes 'Yes, but,' 'No, but,' and 'No whoopee.

Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner.

It is better to be a slave to your beloved woman than a free man to the unloved one.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

Each person decides in early childhood how he will live and how he will die... His trivial behavior may be decided by reason, but his important decisions have already been made: what kind of person he will marry, how many children he will have, what kind of bed he will die in... It is incredible to think, at first, that man's fate, all his nobility and all his degradation, is decided by a child no more than six years old, and usually three... (but) it is very easy to believe by looking at what is happening in the world today, and what happened yesterday, and seeing what will happen tomorrow.

The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull.

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.