Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense.
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.
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.
I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
The goal of all life is death.
The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.