I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.
It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science.
Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.
Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
The communal life of human beings had... a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.
I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.