Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its 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.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
…our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.
Couldn’t I for once have you and the work at the same time?
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss
public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood – the time when he was his own ideal.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
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.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time … I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.
…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct….
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
Only a rebuke that ‘has something in it’ will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man’s life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.
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.
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.
A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.
When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Analogies it is true decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home.
The great question which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul is “what does a woman want”?
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.
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.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
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.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.