The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

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

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states.

It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.