Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

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.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris.

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ''dark continent'' for psychology.

The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

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.

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

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

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 feminine soul, is ''What does a woman want?''

The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, `What does woman want?'

I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.

The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us -- of becoming happy -- is not attainable: yet we may not -- nay, cannot -- give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ''happy'' is not included in the plan of ''Creation.''

Sigmund Freud once said, 'What do women want?' The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

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

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

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

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

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

By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.

The goal of all life is death.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

One is very crazy when in love.

No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.

The ego is not master in its own house.

Anatomy is destiny.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ''right'' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ''brute force.''

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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.

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.