Sigmund Freud Quotes

275 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

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
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.

Sigmund Freud
Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years.... They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.

Sigmund Freud
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

Sigmund Freud
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.

Sigmund Freud
Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

Sigmund Freud
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they could have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.

Sigmund Freud
Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Sigmund Freud
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

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

Sigmund Freud
I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

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

Sigmund Freud
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

Sigmund Freud
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

Sigmund Freud
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love

Sigmund Freud
Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.

Sigmund Freud
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 amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.

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

Sigmund Freud
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.

Sigmund Freud
We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way.

Sigmund Freud
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

Sigmund Freud
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.

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.

Sigmund Freud
The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such...

Sigmund Freud
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

Sigmund Freud
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

Sigmund Freud