Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.