Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded."

"Work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work, at least, he is securely attached to a part of reality, the human community."

"A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love."

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

"Ethics is… to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt – as an endeavor to achieve, by means of a command of the superego, something which has so far not been achieved by means of any other cultural activities. As we already know, the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization – namely, the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another."

"It is not attention that the child is seeking but love."

"Man is not a being different from animals, or superior to them."

"One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall into two classes of leaders and followers. The latter constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses."

"People should not strive to eliminate their complexes, but to get in accord with them; they are legitimately what directs their contacts with the world."

"Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end, death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry."

"Children are completely egoistic,; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them."

"The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future."

"The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp any part of its province."

"The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'what does a woman want?'"

"The interpretation of dreams is the via regia [i.e., royal road] to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life."

"Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense."

"What no human soul desires there is no need to prohibit; it is automatically excluded. The very emphasis of the commandment, Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with whom the lust for killing was in the blood, as possibly it is to this day with ourselves."

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

"A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual."

"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."

"A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."

"A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him."

"A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power."

"A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer."

"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success."

"A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness."

"A child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it; and, furthermore, introducing object loss as an unavoidable step in the path to mental evolution, that it is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs."

"A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa."

"A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist."

"A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable."

"A sadist is always at the same time a masochist."

"A woman should soften but not weaken a man."

"Admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological."

"Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relations to her male child)."

"All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it."

"All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love."

"All that matters is love and work."

"America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless."

"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen ... but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a"

"An instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things"

"An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person."

"An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols."

"Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home."

"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."

"Anatomy is destiny."