Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body,...
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe...
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
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.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The goal of all life is death.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.