The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only person better you should be, this is who you are now.
The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.
Love is a state of temporary psychosis.
The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind – separate from the conscious mind – that is constantly at work molding our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
A father’s death is the most important event, the most heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man’s life.
A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
The world is no nursery.
Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.
Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.
This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.