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The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is: What does a woman want?
Throughout the ages, the problem of woman has puzzled people of every kind.
~ in New Introductory Lessons in Psychoanalysis
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
~ in The Future of Illusion
Jesus could have been an ordinary deluded creature.
~ in a letter to Oskar Pfister
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief .
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.
Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; noting is past or forgotten.
~ in The Interpretation of Dreams
No one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every man of us is convinced of his own immortality.
~ in The Interpretation of Dreams
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Anatomy is destiny.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
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.
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.
If youth knew; if age could.
Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
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.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
