Sigmund Freud

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.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.

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

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."

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

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.

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.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

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

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.