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No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
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The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
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Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.
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This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
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We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
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My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.
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One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
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The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.
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A lady once expressed herself in society - the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!"
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A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
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Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.
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Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
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Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
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A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
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No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
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Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
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We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
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The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.
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In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
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It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
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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.
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In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
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Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
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Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.