Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Sigmund Freud
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.
The ego is not master in its own house.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
If youth knew; if age could.
The goal of all life is death.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
If you can't do it, give up!
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Anatomy is destiny.
One is very crazy when in love.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
