The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory.

In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.

The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.