I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
Sigmund Freud

I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Sigmund Freud

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.
Sigmund Freud

If you can't do it, give up!
Sigmund Freud

If youth knew; if age could.
Sigmund Freud

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

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?
Sigmund Freud

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

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.
Sigmund Freud

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

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

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud

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

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.
Sigmund Freud

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud

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

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
Sigmund Freud

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
Sigmund Freud