Sigmund Freud (Psychologist)

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 soul

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

— Sigmund Freud mind

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

— Sigmund Freud intellect

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

— Sigmund Freud emotions

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 time

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

— Sigmund Freud love

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

— Sigmund Freud man

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 self

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

— Sigmund Freud crazy

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

— Sigmund Freud

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

— Sigmund Freud art

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

— Sigmund Freud mind

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

— Sigmund Freud freedom

Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.

— Sigmund Freud love

The goal of all life is death.

— Sigmund Freud life

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

— Sigmund Freud time

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

— Sigmund Freud ego

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 freedom

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. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

— Sigmund Freud experience

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

— Sigmund Freud think

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

— Sigmund Freud power

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

— Sigmund Freud strength

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

— Sigmund Freud beautiful

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

— Sigmund Freud

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

— Sigmund Freud america

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

— Sigmund Freud success

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

— Sigmund Freud home

Anatomy is destiny.

— Sigmund Freud destiny

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness.You have to catch it yourself.

— Sigmund Freud happiness

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

— Sigmund Freud man

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 soul

Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.

— Sigmund Freud education

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 wisdom

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the laymans belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

— Sigmund Freud life

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

— Sigmund Freud love

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.

— Sigmund Freud truth

Most pepole do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibilities, and most people are frightened of them.

— Sigmund Freud freedom

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

— Sigmund Freud love

Dreams are representations of unfulfilled wishes and repressed feeling.

— Sigmund Freud dreams

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

— Sigmund Freud you

We like to forget that in fact everything in our life is chance, from our genesis out of the encounter of spermatozoon and egg onward.

— Sigmund Freud life

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.

— Sigmund Freud love

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

— Sigmund Freud emotions

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

— Sigmund Freud love

Being extremely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

— Sigmund Freud self

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a fathers protection.

— Sigmund Freud childhood

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in mans evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity

— Sigmund Freud religion

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

— Sigmund Freud religion

No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.

— Sigmund Freud man

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another

— Sigmund Freud war

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out and out unbeliever

— Sigmund Freud life

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 self

We have to distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to study.... The second class of instincts was not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize sadism as its representative. On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros ... aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts ... would be endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life itself would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends.

— Sigmund Freud life

We hate the criminal and deal severely with him, because we view in his deeds as in a distorting mirror our own criminal tendencies.

— Sigmund Freud hate

And in the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as a civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.

— Sigmund Freud love

And now look at the great war still devastating Europe: think of the colossal brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty?

— Sigmund Freud war

Those who love fairy-tales do not like it when people speak of the innate tendencies in mankind toward aggression, destruction, and, in addition, cruelty. God has made them in his own image, with his own perfections; no one wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence-in spite of all the protestations of Christian Science-of evil with His omnipotence and supreme goodness.

— Sigmund Freud love

Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This cultural frustration dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight.

— Sigmund Freud life

It seems to be my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nurse maid knows; and that the night dreams are just as much a wish fulfillment as day dreams.

— Sigmund Freud 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 books

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

— 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 life

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

— Sigmund Freud america

One is very crazy when in love.

— Sigmund Freud love

It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too

— Sigmund Freud sex

— Sigmund Freud time

The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders

— Sigmund Freud history

The goal of all life is death.

— Sigmund Freud life

A great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of early wishes to escape the family and especially the father

— Sigmund Freud art

We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth

— Sigmund Freud sex

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home

— Sigmund Freud home

Conscience is the internal perception of the reaction of a particular wish operating within us

— Sigmund Freud science

Anatomy is destiny.

— Sigmund Freud destiny

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love

— Sigmund Freud love

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

— Sigmund Freud time

One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.

— Sigmund Freud self

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

— Sigmund Freud intelligence

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

— Sigmund Freud life

Religious doctrinesare all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.Ch. 6

— Sigmund Freud believe

The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.The Anatomy of the Mental Personality Lecture 31

— Sigmund Freud time

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.Ch. 8

— Sigmund Freud anger

At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.Alternate translation by Abraham Arden Brill, p. 483. Freud did use the Latin phrase via regia in the original as opposed to translating it into the German of the surrounding text.

— Sigmund Freud life

But mans helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise 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 life

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.A Philosophy of Life Lecture 35

— Sigmund Freud life

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

— Sigmund Freud passion

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