Sigmund Freud

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

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

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

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

One is very crazy when in love.

The tendency to aggression is an innate independent instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Anatomy is destiny.

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

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

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.

The psychical whatever its nature may be is itself unconscious.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

The ego is not master in its own house.

Yes America is gigantic but a gigantic mistake.

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

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

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.

The goal of all life is death.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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.

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.

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

The mind is like an iceberg it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

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.

If you can't do it give up!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?'

Where id was there ego shall be.

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

Most people do not really want freedom because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Man has as it were become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent, but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

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

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.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

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

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

Incidentally why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

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.

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

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