“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud
“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud
“No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
― 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 first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
― Sigmund Freud
“The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.”
― Sigmund Freud
“When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
― Sigmund Freud
“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. ”
― Sigmund Freud
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
― Sigmund Freud
“This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud
“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
― Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873-1939
“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Time spent with cats is never wasted”.”
― Sigmund Freud
“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
― Sigmund Freud
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
“The madman is a dreamer awake”
― Sigmund Freud
“Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.”
― 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
“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
― Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love
“The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
“The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Where id is, there shall ego be”
― Sigmund Freud, The Ego And The Id
“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― 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
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
― Sigmund Freud
“Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud, Introduction à la psychanalyse
“The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“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, Reflections on War and Death
“Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
― Sigmund Freud
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud
“A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud
“The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud
“I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Anatomy is destiny.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
― Sigmund Freud
“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.”
― Sigmund Freud
“Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.”
― Sigmund Freud
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud
“The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“The time comes when each 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.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
“We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies . But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“It goes without saying that 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.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
“Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”
― Sigmund Freud
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
“It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.”
― Sigmund Freud
“My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
“The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.”
― Sigmund Freud
“I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.”
― Sigmund Freud
“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
― Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud
“...it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
“Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
“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.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory
“Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
“Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".”
― Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 9
“The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.”
― Sigmund Freud
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