No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions...

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time … I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.

Accordingly, identification, or the formation of composite figures, serves different purposes: first, to represent a feature both persons have in common; secondly, to represent a displaced common feature; but thirdly, to find expression for a...

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

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Couldn’t I for once have you and the work at the same time?

It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.

It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these...

The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian–an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with...

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

Everyone owes nature a death.

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities....

In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many...

Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order...

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

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

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…, from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from...

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if...

The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.

Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations...

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

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of...

I may now add that 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,...

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

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality,...

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves

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

Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited – and indeed the threat to it is great enough...

Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love

Only a rebuke that ‘has something in it’ will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the...

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...

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are...

At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have...

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and...

Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.