Sigmund Freud

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

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

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.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.

When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

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