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Quotes by Sigmund Freud

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
– Sigmund Freud
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
– Sigmund Freud
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
– Sigmund Freud
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
– Sigmund Freud
Anatomy is destiny.
– Sigmund Freud
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
– Sigmund Freud
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
– Sigmund Freud
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
– 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
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief .
– Sigmund Freud
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
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
– Sigmund Freud
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
– Sigmund Freud
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
If youth knew; if age could.
– Sigmund Freud
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
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
– Sigmund Freud
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
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
– Sigmund Freud
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
– Sigmund Freud
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
– Sigmund Freud
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
One is very crazy when in love.
– Sigmund Freud
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
– Sigmund Freud
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
– Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
– Sigmund Freud
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
– Sigmund Freud
The ego is not master in its own house.
– Sigmund Freud
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
– Sigmund Freud
The goal of all life is death.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
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
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.
– Sigmund Freud
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
– Sigmund Freud
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
– Sigmund Freud
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
– Sigmund Freud
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
– Sigmund Freud
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
We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
– Sigmund Freud
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
– 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
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
– Sigmund Freud
We are certainly getting ahead; if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.
– Sigmund Freud
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
– Sigmund Freud
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
– Sigmund Freud
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
– Sigmund Freud
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
– Sigmund Freud
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
– Sigmund Freud
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
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.
– Sigmund Freud
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.
– Sigmund Freud
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
– Sigmund Freud
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
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
– Sigmund Freud