Sigmund Freud quotes:

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  • 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?'

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

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

  • Time spent with cats is never wasted.

  • 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.

  • Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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."

  • Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

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

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

  • 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.

  • A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

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

  • The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.

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

  • I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

  • Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.

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

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

  • 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

  • There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

  • 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.

  • The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.

  • 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.

  • You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

  • 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.

  • One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.

  • The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

  • 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.

  • The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.

  • The ego is not master in its own house.

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

  • Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.

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

  • Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

  • The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.

  • It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

  • An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

  • 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. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

  • Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

  • 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.

  • My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

  • An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.

  • A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

  • The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

  • When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

  • 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.

  • A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

  • We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

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

  • Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

  • The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

  • A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

  • I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

  • The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore.

  • Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

  • Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.

  • We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.

  • The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.

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

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

  • 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.

  • Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

  • The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.

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

  • Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

  • So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

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

  • 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?

  • Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

  • A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

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

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

  • When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.

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

  • This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

  • Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

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

  • If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

  • A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.

  • When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

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

  • We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

  • 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.

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