Sigmund Freud Quotes

Sigmund Freud Quotes

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

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

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.

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

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

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

Everyone owes nature a death.

Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

I may now add that 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.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

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.

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

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.

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

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.

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