The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.
Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. – A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
If children could, if adults knew.
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can’t control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Now it is nothing but torture.