Sigmund Freud > Quotes

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― 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

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud

“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?”
― Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.”
― 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

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― 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

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

“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud

“This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
― Sigmund Freud

“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, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873-1939

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― 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

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud

“America is a mistake, a giant mistake.”
― Sigmund Freud

“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

“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“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

“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
― Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love

“The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
― Sigmund Freud

“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Where id is, there shall ego be”
― Sigmund Freud, The Ego And The Id

“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

“Time spent with cats is never wasted”.”
― 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

“The madman is a dreamer awake”
― 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, Reflections on War and Death

“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

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
― 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

“The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introduction à la psychanalyse

“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, Civilization and Its Discontents

“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud

“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

“Anatomy is destiny.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
― Sigmund Freud