A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion – in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only person better you should be, this is who you are now.
The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.
Love is a state of temporary psychosis.
The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind – separate from the conscious mind – that is constantly at work molding our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
A father’s death is the most important event, the most heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man’s life.
A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.