Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.Collection: Wisdom
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.Collection: Parenting
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.Collection: Knowledge
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.Collection: Religion
If youth knew; if age could.Collection: Brainy
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.Collection: Gardening
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Happiness
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.Collection: Intelligence
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.Collection: Society
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?'Collection: Great
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.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Experience
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.Collection: Brainy
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.Collection: Work
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.Collection: Work
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.Collection: Home
The goal of all life is death.Collection: Death
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.Collection: Dreams
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.Collection: Experience
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.Collection: Love
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.Collection: Freedom
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.Collection: Success
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.Collection: Time
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.Collection: Men
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Success
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
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.
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.
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.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.