The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

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

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.