Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.

I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.

Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.