Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. |
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. |
It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too |
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression. |
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. |
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand |
It seems to be my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nurse maid knows; and that the night dreams are just as much a wish fulfillment as day dreams. |
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need. |
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to |
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. |
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief |
Life as we find it, is too hard for us: it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it, we cannot dispense with palliative measures…There are three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitute satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances which make us insensitive to it. |
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill. |
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness |
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times. |