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.
Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.
We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!
The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.
A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls” was urgently necessary or society was “doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.
I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion.
Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.
Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.