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.
— Sigmund Freud
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
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?
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
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.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
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 ego is not master in its own house.
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.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
The goal of all life is death.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
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.
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.
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.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
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.
America is a mistake, a giant 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.
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.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
If you can't do it, give up!
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
Anatomy is destiny.
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 liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
If youth knew; if age could.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
