Sigmund Freud

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

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so does a prudent man hesitate to commit his emotional life with all its hopes and fears to a single woman.

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

The sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.

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

The neurotic is a person who has not been able to resolve his conflicts.

The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.

Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him a great deal of trouble at times.

The child is father of the man.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id.

Civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

The poet is an unacknowledged legislator of the world.

The only way to escape the effects of the past is to face it squarely.

The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to help people achieve a more mature and realistic understanding of themselves and their relationships.

The unconscious is the true psychic reality.