Sigmund Freud Quotes

275 Sourced Quotes

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Sigmund Freud
The poor ego... serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.

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
A culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence nor deserves it.

Sigmund Freud
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Sigmund Freud
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

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

Sigmund Freud
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conquerer, that confidence of success that often induces real success.

Sigmund Freud
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.

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

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

Sigmund Freud
It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

Sigmund Freud
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

Sigmund Freud
Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.

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.

Sigmund Freud
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

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
Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

Sigmund Freud
In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.

Sigmund Freud
The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.

Sigmund Freud
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.

Sigmund Freud
A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Sigmund Freud
The communal life of human beings had... a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.

Sigmund Freud
What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

Sigmund Freud
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud
The mind is an iceberg—it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.

Sigmund Freud
The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris.

Sigmund Freud
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

Sigmund Freud