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.
I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.
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?
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
