When we share – that is poetry in the prose of life.
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.
A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?
Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
The unconscious – that is to say, the ‘repressed’ – offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day – until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.