"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."
— Sigmund Freud

"No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."
— Sigmund Freud

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
— Sigmund Freud

"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
— Sigmund Freud

"Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength."
— Sigmund Freud

"Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer... the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?"
— Sigmund Freud

"When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it."
— Sigmund Freud

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate. "
— Sigmund Freud

"The paranoid is never entirely mistaken."
— Sigmund Freud

"Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy."
— Sigmund Freud

"(Said of the Irish) "This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

(This quote may be misattributed as I have not yet found a reliable source that confirms that Freud made this comment about the Irish.)"
— Sigmund Freud

"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."
— Sigmund Freud

"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."
— Sigmund Freud

"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."
— Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. "
— Sigmund Freud

"[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 (The Future of an Illusion)

"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."
— Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
— Sigmund Freud

"He does not believe that does not live according to his belief."
— Sigmund Freud

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."
— Sigmund Freud

"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism."
— Sigmund Freud

"Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor."
— Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion)

"In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
— Sigmund Freud

"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."
— Sigmund Freud

"What do women want? "
— Sigmund Freud

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
— Sigmund Freud

"You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father."
— Sigmund Freud

"Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it."
— Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."
— Sigmund Freud

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. "
— Sigmund Freud

"We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds."
— Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion)

"I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream."
— Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"A woman should soften but not weaken a man."
— Sigmund Freud

"I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me."
— Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."
— Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."
— Sigmund Freud

"Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it."
— Sigmund Freud

"Mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces its way through every pore."
— Sigmund Freud

"When inspiration doesn't come to me, I go half way to meet it."
— Sigmund Freud

"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature."
— Sigmund Freud

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
— Sigmund Freud

"Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?"
— Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion)

"Where id is, there shall ego be"
— Sigmund Freud (The Ego and the Id)

"Insecurity and darkness robbed me of my watch!"
— Sigmund Freud

"In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature."
— Sigmund Freud

"If you can't do it, give up"
— Sigmund Freud

"Anatomy is destiny."
— Sigmund Freud

"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."
— Sigmund Freud

"Analogies decide nothing, that is true, but they can make someone feel more at hom."
— Sigmund Freud

"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
— Sigmund Freud