Great Throughts Treasury

"Love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder."

"Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death."

"Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself."

"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."

"Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine."

"Men are strong only so long as they represent a strong idea. They become powerless when they oppose it."

"Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the effect of anxiety."

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."

"Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality."

"Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever."

"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."

"Neurosis seems to be a human privilege."

"Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young."

"No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

"No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

"No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life."

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."

"No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society."

"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."

"Not all men are worthy of love."

"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."

"Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and if they haven't died, they are still alive today."

"One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' . . . We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things."

"One is very crazy when in love."

"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go."

"One must not be mean with the affections what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself."

"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past."

"Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity."

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."

"Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal. What we call our unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content. The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses."

"Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength."

"Poets ... are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams ... not yet made accessible to science."

"Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."

"Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love."

"Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question"."

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities."

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses."

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis ... mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."

"Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion."

"Religious doctrines ... are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."

"Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature."

"Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends."

"Secrets make you sick."

"Sex is the mathematical urge repressed."

"Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it."

"Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door."

"Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss."

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

"Such progress we have made! In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me as a witch, but now they are content to burn my book."