Great Throughts Treasury

"I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy."

"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."

"If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."

"If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority."

"If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?"

"If you can't do it, give up!"

"If youth knew; if age could."

"Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complain when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."

"Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion."

"In fact 'inferiority complex' is a technical term that is scarcely used in psycho-analysis. For us it does not bear the meaning of anything simple, let alone elementary. To trace it back to the self-perception of possible organic defects, as the school of what are known as 'Individual Psychologists' likes to do, seems to us a short-sighted error. The sense of inferiority has strong erotic roots. A child feels inferior if he notices that he is not loved, and so does an adult. The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris. But the major part of the sense of inferiority derives from the ego's relation to its super-ego; like the sense of guilt it is an expression of the tension between them. Altogether, it is hard to separate the sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt. It would perhaps be right to regard the former as the erotic complement to the moral sense of inferiority."

"In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it — the present, that is to say, must have become the past — before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future."

"In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense."

"In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites."

"In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us. The expression: “The devil take him,” which so frequently crosses our lips in the form of an ill-humored jest, but by which we really intend to say, “Death take him,” is a serious and forceful death wish in our unconscious. Indeed our unconscious murders even for trifles... Thus, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man. It is lucky that all wishes do not possess the power which people of primitive times attributed to them. For in the cross fire of mutual maledictions mankind would have perished long ago, not excepting the best and wisest of men as well as the most beautiful and charming women."

"In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."

"In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?"

"In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness... the second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature… But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind."

"In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."

"In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature."

"In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to"

"In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart."

"In view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions."

"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?"

"Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illnas a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger."

"Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones."

"It goes without saying that 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."

"It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too."

"It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious: catechism by something else, even a scientific one."

"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression [aggressiveness]."

"It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world."

"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."

"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct."

"It is indeed a mystery why the individual members of nations should disdain, hate, and abhor each other at all, even in times of peace. I do not know why it is. It seems as if all the moral achievements of the individual were obliterated in the case of a large number of people, not to mention millions, until only the most primitive, oldest, and most brutal psychic inhibitions remained."

"It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match."

"It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being."

"It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics—ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind—and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you."

"It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand."

"It must be admitted that women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life."

"It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe."

"It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need."

"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."

"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief."

"Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations."

"Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies."

"Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked."

"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."

"Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables."

"Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill."

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

"Love and work... work and love, that's all there is."