The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three...The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

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

Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.