Top 100 Freud's Quotes
#1. I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
Wallace Shawn
#2. Freud's fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.
Walter Benjamin
#3. Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.
Siri Hustvedt
#4. Psychotherapy
A long, drawn out process consisting of subtle probings of the human mind, whereby women are blamed for all of Freud's shortcomings.
Marc Cooper
#5. People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.
Peter Gay
#6. This harkens back to Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants.
Daniel Goleman
#7. After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised
J.G. Ballard
#8. Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).
Sandra Scarr
#9. Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.
Ken Dodd
#10. As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Dennis Potter
#11. Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
Jerry Saltz
#12. And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.
Chaim Potok
#13. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.
Stephen King
#14. Freud 's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#15. While Darwin's tear is a defense, and Freud's tear is a symptomatic eruption, Sartre's tear is a refusal.
Eugenie Brinkema
#16. He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.
Oliver Sacks
#17. In Freud's theory, the wish-producing, fear-generating power of these body parts lies within them, not, with their strategic position within a historically specific, male-dominant, phallus-favoring, social organization of powers, bodies, and symbols.
Jonathan Ned Katz
#18. Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?
Tony Campolo
#19. Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
Mortimer Adler
#20. The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market - it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself.
Erich Fromm
#21. The child is father of the man ... .attributed to Sigmund Freud, but believed to have been coined by a well-known poet years before Freud's time
Shirl Solomon
#22. [Freud's] sense of reality is less clouded by wishful thinking than is the case with other people and [he combines] the qualities of critical judgment, earnestness and responsibility.
Albert Einstein
#23. Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#24. Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?
Natalie Angier
#25. Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.
Susanna Kaysen
#27. If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.
Anne Roiphe
#28. A LL THE ENTRIES in Freud's diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long.
Clive James
#29. Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within.
Steve Jones
#30. I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.
Stanislav Grof
#31. One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
Walter Lippmann
#32. Freud's warning that what I omit without thinking (i.e. without conscious thought) may be the key to the deepest truth about me?
J.M. Coetzee
#33. No one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that ...
William H Gass
#34. From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.
Irving Stone
#35. I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous
but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven.
Anna Quindlen
#36. But the resurrection without the crucifixion is empty optimism, an optimism that gives credence to Freud's notion that wishful thinking is the sum and substance of our faith. Include the crucifixion
and our role in that bloody moment
and the whole picture changes.
Mark Galli
#37. The name [Spooky] comes from well back in university I was doing a series of essays and writing about Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny and I was really intrigued by this idea of "The Unheimlich".
DJ Spooky
#38. As these examples show, Freud's theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.
Sigmund Freud
#39. Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.
Nathaniel Branden
#40. I remain too impressed with Freud's vision of the human animal's compromise with existence
the defense or deflection of our ego in knowledge of ourselves from what there is to know about ourselves
to suppose that a human life can get itself without residue into the clear.
Stanley Cavell
#41. If I'm not mistaken, Sigmund Freud said that in every idealisation there's an aggression. Depicting the Pope as a sort of Superman, a star, is offensive to me. The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps calmly and has friends like everyone else. A normal person.
Pope Francis
#42. Perhaps it wasn't all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart - and less messily, too.
Stephen King
#43. If anyone tells me I'm fat, I say, - That's because every time I make love to your wife, she gives me a biscuit
Clement Freud
#44. Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we've got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead."
"He's not dead; just very tired.
Libba Bray
#45. The first is the Credo quia absurdum of the early Father. It would imply that religious doctrines are outside reason's jurisdiction; they stand above reason. Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.
Sigmund Freud
#46. American feminism's nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.
Camille Paglia
#47. I have vaguely entertained the idea of learning how to use the Internet and email. It looks easy, but I'm sure it's harder than it seems. Never having used a computer makes a big difference. I haven't a clue which keys to press.
Bella Freud
#48. The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.
Sigmund Freud
#49. There's no law that decrees when not to whinge, but you reach a certain age - 80 seems about right - when you're expected to manifest querulousness - the coffee's too hot, the boiled egg's too soft ...
Clement Freud
#50. Devon: "Why, Bryn, I do believe he's given her your pen."
Bryn: "Well, get Freud on the phone. He'll have a field day with this one.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#51. There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies ... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.
Sigmund Freud
#52. No. Freud said it best, I think, when he said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Sometimes your mother's boyfriend is just a loser
Nenia Campbell
#53. There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.
What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself. She's good, being gone.
The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.
William Shakespeare
#54. The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
Lucian Freud
#55. Jung viewed Freud as a mentor, but he never wanted to be anybody's disciple.
Viggo Mortensen
#56. The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.
Lucian Freud
#57. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Daniel Keyes
#58. Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.
John Malkovich
#59. If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
Sigmund Freud
#60. I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
Lucian Freud
#62. An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
Sigmund Freud
#63. When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.
Bat For Lashes
#64. According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.
Sigmund Freud
#65. I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.
Bob Dylan
#66. Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish - that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good.
Steven Pressfield
#67. You know, Freud accepted his lot very stoically and very well and with a sense of humor. He aged and died gracefully, and there's a lot to be said for that.
Viggo Mortensen
#68. You're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent
Muriel Spark
#69. The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
Lucian Freud
#71. Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.
Sigmund Freud
#72. It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.
Sigmund Freud
#73. Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it - all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.
Sigmund Freud
#74. Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.
Vera Farmiga
#75. Love and work ... work and love, that's all there is.
Sigmund Freud
#76. A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
Sigmund Freud
#78. Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology?
Clare Boothe Luce
#80. A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
Sigmund Freud
#81. I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,
Matthew Freud
#82. A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.
Lucian Freud
#83. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
Sigmund Freud
#84. Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
R.D. Laing
#85. The purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient's conversion to the therapist's interpretation.
Adolf Grunbaum
#86. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.
Sigmund Freud
#87. Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves.
But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#88. Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question.
Sigmund Freud
#89. Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.
Sigmund Freud
#90. I'm part of an industry that everybody wants to be a part of. I do hang out with a lot of sort of powerful, interesting people like Bella Freud or Jay Joplin or Tracey Emin. I'm part of that group of people. Brit artists who are doing things. That's what I do. Some of them happen to be aristocrats.
Duncan Roy
#91. A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.
Esther Freud
#92. What's wrong with your father? Huh? Can't he do this? Or have you been reading Freud? WARD, have you been reading the baby Freud?
Benjamin R. Smith
#93. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Sigmund Freud
#94. Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
Sigmund Freud
#95. One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard "Siegfried and Roy" as "Sigmund Freud." The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men's makeup-haunts me to this day.
Mary Roach
#96. I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.
Sigmund Freud
#97. Freud suggests that in order to love someone else, one must love themselves; it's a classic "needs before other needs" argument. Unfortunately, no one really loves themselves . And, if they do, they need to get to know themselves better. Unfortunately, no one is really happy.
Pete Wentz
#98. Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.
Sigmund Freud
#99. Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other's business.
Robert Frost
#100. I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.
Lucian Freud
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