Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has...

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what...

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the...

If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that...

A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological...

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their...

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can’t control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the...

public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can...

This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of...

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

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

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

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...