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.
History is just new people making old mistakes.
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.
I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates.
What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that’s when they are really making some progress.
The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.
The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.
A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.