The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

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

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador

Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.