In the words of Sigmund Freud:
Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
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.
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.
One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
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