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.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador.
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea. They become powerless when they oppose it.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.
Love and work, work and love... that’s all there is.
Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires – or forbidden to him – he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself.
That which we can’t remember, we will repeat.
The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man’s turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.
Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.
I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
It often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.
Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.