What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.