90 quotes
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
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.
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
Whoever loves become humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
Leonardo da Vinci (1916)
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)
When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.
The Problem of Anxiety (1925)
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
Letter to Carl Jung (1906)
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Letter to Ernest Jones (1933)
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
On his seventieth birthday (1926)
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
Aggressiveness was not created by property.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice—that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva.
The ego is not master in its own house.
A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)