Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?
History is strewn with ideas that were intuitive and made sense at the time, but were also hopelessly wrong.
The work of a science blogger is largely comprised of correcting and criticizing bad science news reporting.
We Icelanders are an excellent animal model for humans. This is exactly the way you find common disease genes.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--
One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.