 A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. |
| If you can't do it, give up! |
| Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. |
| Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. |
| America is a mistake, a giant mistake. |
| 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. |
| If youth knew; if age could. |
| The goal of all life is death. |
| Time spent with cats is never wasted. |
| 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. |
| Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake. |
| 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?" |
| 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. |
| The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him. |
| Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts. |
| 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 is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think. |
| The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety. |
| The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition. |
| The ego is not master in its own house. |
| The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. |
