[.] Quotes
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.
Women are quite capable of entering into a friendship with a man, but to keep it going—that takes a little physical antipathy as well.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time
What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.
Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.
"Beyond Good and Evil"
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.
Plato is boring.
Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
God is dead.
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to
know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.
"Dark Glasses," sect. 2, A Lover's Discourse
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive... and impoverished.
To eat steak rare ... represents both a nature and a morality.
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
At any rate, I am convinced that he [God] does not play dice.
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Anatomy is destiny.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
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.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
If youth knew; if age could.
If you can't do it, give up!
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.
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.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
One is very crazy when in love.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
The ego is not master in its own house.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
The goal of all life is death.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
I don't believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it.
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.
Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.
I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.
There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
― Annie Hall: Screenplay
The heart wants what it wants.
The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.