From the Writings of Sigmund Freud

I am not really a man of science. . . . I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador — an adventurer . . . with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belongs to that type of being.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror — that confidence of success that often induces real success.

Why should analyzed people be altogether better than others? Analysis makes for unity, but not necessarily for goodness. ... I think that too heavy a burden is laid on analysis when one asks of it that it should be able to realize every precious ideal.

Geniuses are unbearable people. You have only to ask my family to learn how easy I am to live with, so I certainly cannot be a genius.

The great question . . . which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

My life has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract there.

They may abuse my doctrines by day, but I am sure they dream of them at night.

Imaginative writers are valuable colleagues [of the psychoanalyst], and their testimony is to be rated very highly, because they have a way of knowing many of the things between heaven and earth which are not dreamed of in our philosophy.

In the expressions of the psyche, there is nothing trifling, nothing arbitrary and lawless.

I have to be somewhat miserable in order to write well.

Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.

[The goal of psychoanalysis is] to substitute for neurotic misery ordinary human unhappiness.

It seems to be my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nursemaid knows; and that night dreams are just as much wish-fulfillment as daydreams.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. . . . This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.