No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interfere with it.
I’ve been a fortunate man in life. Nothing has come easily.
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too.
A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
There are no mistakes.
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.
It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.