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

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

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

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