Sigmund Freud

Much of our everyday talk is concerned with managing reality by mitigating its terrors.

My dear child, you are not the first to have been frightened by the devil, but you are the first to have driven him away.

Neurosis is the inability to bear the pain of the repressed.

No human who holds another human in his heart can ever die.

Occasionally a monument is erected to a man who has been a benefactor of the human race, but it is nearly always something else, usually his memory of some woman.

One is very much mistaken if one imagines that the significant influence of the unconscious can be got rid of by denying its existence.

Our knowledge of the unconscious does not give us the right to deny its existence.

Sadism is not an independent instinct but a derivative of the instinct of mastery.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is almost always comprehensible.

The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

The mind is like an iceberg; it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

The tendency of all objects and all organisms is to run down to a state of entropy.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

What we call the 'ego' is mainly a precipitate of the abandonment of object-cathexes.

Whenever I see a man who is passionately devoted to some cause, I always wonder what his sexual interests are.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair.

The more the parents are in conflict, the more the child is in conflict.

No one who has been in the habit of working, and has never been a prey to idleness, can understand the craving for work which affects those who have been long unemployed.

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They are all wish-fulfillments.