One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
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.
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
The madman is a dreamer awake
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
Where id is, there shall ego be
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
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.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
The ego is not master in its own house.
A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
There are no mistakes
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
Anatomy is destiny.
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
It goes without saying that 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.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.
A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.
. )
Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world).
If children could, if adults knew.
I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
Dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.
I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur.
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss
The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.
Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. [speaking about the Irish]
According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.
Everyone owes nature a death.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.
The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
