Sigmund Freud Quotes

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.

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

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

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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?'

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

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

I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash...

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.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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

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.

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

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

Where id was, there ego shall be.

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.

The ego is not master in its own house.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

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

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

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

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

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

Anatomy is destiny.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

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

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

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

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

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

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.

The goal of all life is death.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

One is very crazy when in love.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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

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

Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

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

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

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's 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.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.

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

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

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.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

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.

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

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

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.

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

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

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

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