Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
The unconscious – that is to say, the ‘repressed’ – offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day – until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus’s misadventure in discovering America.
None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim... to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.
In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
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 rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.