An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively. . . .

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

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.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.