The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.

Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

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.

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