Sigmund Freud

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

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

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

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.

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.

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

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.