Sigmund Freud Quotations

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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

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

The ego is not master in its own house.

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.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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

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

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

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

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?'

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

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

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

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

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 feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy'' is not included in the plan of ''Creation.''

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ''happy'' is not included in the plan of ''Creation.''

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.

I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash.

People are made either to sufffer or to destroy.

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

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father

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

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

Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning how to darn socks

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.

I have yet not been able to answer the great question that has never been answered. 'What does a woman want?

The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders

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

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

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

the first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.

...the first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.

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

To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.

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.

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.

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

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.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

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

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'.

Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.

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.

A lady once expressed herself in society - the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!"

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness, and it guides - by - precepts - backed by the full force of its authority.

An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.