Sigmund Freud Quotes (143 Quotes)

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

Thought is action in rehearsal.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

One is very crazy when in love.

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ''dark continent'' for psychology.

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.

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

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

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

What do women want, my God, what do they want What does a woman want.

Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief .

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

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

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.

Anatomy is destiny.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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.

Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly science alone is too delicate to admit it.

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

The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage -- in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.

Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.

We are threatened with suffering from three directions from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

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

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

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

The time comes when each one 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.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

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

The might of the community. Yet, it too, is nothing else than violence it is the communal, not individual, violence that has its way.

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 object-relations