Sigmund Freud Quotes (143 Quotes)

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

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's 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

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

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

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.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

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

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

People are made either to sufffer or to destroy.

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.

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

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

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.

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

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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.

If youth knew; if age could.

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.

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

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

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 beingswe know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight.

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 aggression.

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

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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

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.

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

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively....

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.

No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

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

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.

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

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

Where id was, there shall ego be.