Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.

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.