Sigmund Freud

The neurotic builds a fantasy castle in the air and lives in it. The healthy person builds a castle in the air and then builds a foundation under it.

The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (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 much trouble at times.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

The goal 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.

The dream is a product of the mind, but it is not a product of the conscious mind.

The sexual instinct is probably the most powerful motive force in the human psyche.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

The ego is a poor creature, owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the superego.

The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

The dream is a sort of substitute for the infantile scene, modified by the censorship.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.

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 you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the human soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Civilization began the first time an angry man cast a stone instead of a word.

No one who, like me, has delved into the deepest depths of the human soul, can fail to realize that the sexual instinct is the most powerful of all human motives.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be.

The only abnormal people are those who have no neuroses.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.