Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

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.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

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.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

The ego is not master in its own house.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

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.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

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?"

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

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.

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.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief .

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

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.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.

If youth knew; if age could.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

The goal of all life is death.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

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.