Sigmund Freud Quotes

The great question which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul is "what does a woman want"?
Sigmund Freud
Analogies it is true decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home.
Sigmund Freud
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
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
When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
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 in their . . . relations.
Sigmund Freud
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud
When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
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 in their . . . relations.
Sigmund Freud
A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Sigmund Freud
Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.
Sigmund Freud
Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
Sigmund Freud
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Sigmund Freud
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
Sigmund Freud
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
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
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
Sigmund Freud
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
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
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
Sigmund Freud
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
Sigmund Freud
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
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.
Sigmund Freud
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
Sigmund Freud
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
One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.
Sigmund Freud
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
Sigmund Freud
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
Sigmund Freud
…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.
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
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
Sigmund Freud
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Sigmund Freud
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.
Sigmund Freud
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud
We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.
Sigmund Freud
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
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
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
Sigmund Freud
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
Sigmund Freud
...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another.
Sigmund Freud
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
Sigmund Freud
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.
Sigmund Freud
At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side:­ tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.
Sigmund Freud
In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
Sigmund Freud
If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.
Sigmund Freud
Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken off; and that these people either do everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God's kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
Sigmund Freud
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
Sigmund Freud
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud