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

If youth knew; if age could.

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

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

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.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

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

One is very crazy when in love.

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

The goal of all life is death.

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

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

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.

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.

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?'

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

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

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

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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