Sigmund Freud

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 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?'

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The goal of all life is death.

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.

If youth knew if age could.