Sigmund Freud

“I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”

“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”

“We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.”

“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.”

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”

“The goal of all life is death.”

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'”

“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.”

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

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”

“If youth knew; if age could.”

“Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.”

“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 act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”

“Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.”

“Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”

“Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.”

“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.”

“What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.”