Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.

If youth knew; if age could.

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.

Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.