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

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.

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.

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

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.