Top 100 Sigmund Freud Quotes
#1. Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?
Sigmund Freud
#2. A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
Sigmund Freud
#3. The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Sigmund Freud
#4. [The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
Sigmund Freud
#5. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
Sigmund Freud
#6. Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.
Sigmund Freud
#7. Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
Sigmund Freud
#8. Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Sigmund Freud
#9. I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
Sigmund Freud
#10. For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is - art.
Sigmund Freud
#11. The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
Sigmund Freud
#12. Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud
#13. I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality ... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
Sigmund Freud
#14. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
Sigmund Freud
#15. The dream is not a somatic but a psychic phenomenon. You appreciate the significance
Sigmund Freud
#16. Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss
Sigmund Freud
#17. A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.
Sigmund Freud
#18. An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
Sigmund Freud
#19. I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
Sigmund Freud
#20. The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Sigmund Freud
#21. How far back into childhood do our memories reach?
Sigmund Freud
#22. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
Sigmund Freud
#24. From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
#25. I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.
Sigmund Freud
#26. In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
#27. How we who have little belief envy those who are convinced of the existence of a Supreme Power, for whom the world holds no problems because He Himself has created all its institutions!
Sigmund Freud
#28. If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
Sigmund Freud
#29. Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.
Sigmund Freud
#30. All the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states.
Sigmund Freud
#31. The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.
Sigmund Freud
#32. This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
Sigmund Freud
#33. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
#34. In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
Sigmund Freud
#36. When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
Sigmund Freud
#38. For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future.
Sigmund Freud
#39. The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud
#40. We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.
Sigmund Freud
#41. Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Sigmund Freud
#42. When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Sigmund Freud
#44. The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
Sigmund Freud
#45. The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
Sigmund Freud
#46. They love their delusions as they love themselves.
Sigmund Freud
#48. The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
Sigmund Freud
#49. The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
Sigmund Freud
#50. One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world.
Sigmund Freud
#51. The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
#52. In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
Sigmund Freud
#53. Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
Sigmund Freud
#54. Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
Sigmund Freud
#55. It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved.
Sigmund Freud
#56. The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.
Sigmund Freud
#58. Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
Sigmund Freud
#60. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Sigmund Freud
#61. The normal sequence is that energy is prompted at the perceptual system, passes into consciousness, and thence to the motor system, where it is discharged by action. (I feel an unpleasant sensation, realize that I have been bitten by a mosquito, raise my hand, and swat the insect.)
Sigmund Freud
#62. We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
Sigmund Freud
#63. Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud
#64. Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
Sigmund Freud
#65. The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
Sigmund Freud
#66. Couldn't I for once have you and the work at the same time?
Sigmund Freud
#67. It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
Sigmund Freud
#68. I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.
Sigmund Freud
#69. The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.
Sigmund Freud
#70. How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved
Sigmund Freud
#71. One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
Sigmund Freud
#72. Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.
Sigmund Freud wrote to Albert Einstein
Sigmund Freud
#73. When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
Sigmund Freud
#74. The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
Sigmund Freud
#76. Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
Sigmund Freud
#77. It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
Sigmund Freud
#78. Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
Sigmund Freud
#79. Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
Sigmund Freud
#80. My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
Sigmund Freud
#81. Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world).
Sigmund Freud
#82. We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Sigmund Freud
#83. At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity7 of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination.
Sigmund Freud
#84. Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
Sigmund Freud
#85. 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.
Sigmund Freud
#86. No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Sigmund Freud
#87. America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud
#88. The dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought
Sigmund Freud
#89. It may be said that hysteria is as ignorant of the science of the structure of the nervous system as we ourselves before we have learnt it.
Sigmund Freud
#90. When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves
Sigmund Freud
#91. Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.
Sigmund Freud
#92. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
Sigmund Freud
#93. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
Sigmund Freud
#94. The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
Sigmund Freud
#95. The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
Sigmund Freud
#96. In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
Sigmund Freud
#97. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Sigmund Freud
#98. All that is to live in endless song Must in life-time first be drown'd.
Sigmund Freud
#99. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
Sigmund Freud
#100. Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.
Sigmund Freud
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