Famous Sigmund Freud Quotations

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"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."
by Sigmund Freud
"The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris."
by Sigmund Freud
"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success"
by Sigmund Freud
"Anatomy is destiny."
by Sigmund Freud
"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
by Sigmund Freud
"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."
by Sigmund Freud
"From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."
by Sigmund Freud
"From error to error one discovers the entire truth."
by Sigmund Freud
"I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash."
by Sigmund Freud
"If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death."
by Sigmund Freud
"In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart"
by Sigmund Freud
"Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves."
by Sigmund Freud
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct."
by Sigmund Freud
"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief"
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."
by Sigmund Freud
"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."
by Sigmund Freud
"One is very crazy when in love."
by Sigmund Freud
"One must not be mean with the affections what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself."
by Sigmund Freud
"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past"
by Sigmund Freud
"One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed."
by Sigmund Freud
"Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning how to darn socks"
by Sigmund Freud
"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis"
by Sigmund Freud
"Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses."
by Sigmund Freud
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
by Sigmund Freud
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites."
by Sigmund Freud
"Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word."
by Ian Shoales
"Sigmund Freud once said, 'What do women want?' The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that."
by Bill Cosby
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
by Sigmund Freud
"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 ââ?¬Ë?cultural frustrationââ?¬â?¢ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight."
by Sigmund Freud
"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
by Sigmund Freud
"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"The goal of all life is death."
by Sigmund Freud
"The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: What does a woman want?"
by Sigmund Freud
"The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want"
by Sigmund Freud
"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."
by Sigmund Freud
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing"
by Sigmund Freud
"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."
by 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."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love."
by Sigmund Freud
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism."
by Sigmund Freud
"Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake."
by Sigmund Freud
"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"
by Sigmund Freud
"The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture."
by Sigmund Freud
"Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by Sigmund Freud
"The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him."
by Sigmund Freud
"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by Sigmund Freud
"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."
by Sigmund Freud
"The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness."
by 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."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by Sigmund Freud
"It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand."
by Sigmund Freud
"These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable."
by Sigmund Freud
"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."
by Sigmund Freud
"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror."
by Sigmund Freud
"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."
by 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?"
by Sigmund Freud
"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 ..."
by Sigmund Freud


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