The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
Everyone owes nature a death.
May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become 'neurotic'?
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
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.
Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.
Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.
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.
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.
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.
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
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.
For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art.
The ego is not master in its own house.
The madman is a dreamer awake.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.
Then, when the entire mass of these dream-thoughts is subject to the pressure of the dream-work, and the pieces are whirled about, broken up, and pushed up against one another, rather like ice-floes surging down a river, the question arises: what has become of the bonds of logic which had previously given the structure its form?
The way in which these factors—displacement, condensation, and over-determination—interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.
They love their delusions as they love themselves.
But since Freud still conceives the mind as a closed system, desires are not expelled but only hidden away.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
All that is to live in endless song Must in life-time first be drown'd.
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.
That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. ‘For the little children do not like it' when there is talk of man's inborn tendency to ‘wickedness', to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.
The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
In scientific matters it is always experience, and never authority without experience, that gives the final verdict, whether in favour or against.
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.
Contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to them dreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding from the senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or are accidental disturbances of his internal organs.
The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.
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.
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.
The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
