"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 a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization."

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

"The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on."

"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."

"In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual's own intellectual operations, from the belief in the 'omnipotence of thoughts', which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics."

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

"The goal of all life is death."

"The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside."

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

"Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home."

"A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual."

"Analogies it is true decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home."

"Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity."

"Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self."

"Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it."

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

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

"Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar."

"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?""

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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 data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."

"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 is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love."

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

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

"Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world."

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

"A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

"We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts."

"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."

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

"The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them."

"It is asking a great deal of a man, who has learnt to regulate his everyday affairs in accordance with the rules of experience and with due regard to reality, that he should entrust precisely what affects him most nearly to the care of an authority which claims as its prerogative freedom from all the rules of rational thought."

"Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity."

"Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake."

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

"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises."

"From error to error one discovers the entire truth."

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

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."

"It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being."

"Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being."

"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 of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world."