We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.
In our civilization men are afraid they will not be man enough, and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.
The man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love.
Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.
Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men.
Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream world into reality.
To express unafraid and unashamed what one really thinks and feels is one of the great consolations of life.
The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.
The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.
No person loving or admiring himself is alone.
Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
Romance fails us and so do friendships, but the relationship of parent and child, less noisy than all the others, remains indelible and indestructible, the strongest relationship on earth.
Women see through each other, but they rarely look into themselves.
The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting.
The small share of happiness attainable by man exists only insofar as he is able to cease to think of himself.
It is always possible to approach a goal by a detour.
Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish.
It was strange to find that love does not spring from abundance and richness of the ego, but is a way out of inner distress and poverty. We were surprised to discover that our first love is not directed either to another person or to ourselves, but to an imaginary ideal ego, to an image of ourselves as we would like to be. There are stranger discoveries awaiting us the more deeply we grope in the dark and the further we intrude into the secret places of the human heart.
Anybody possessing analytical knowledge recognizes the fact that the world is full of actions performed by people exclusively to their detriment and without perceptible advantage, although their eyes were open.