Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.

The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.

The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.