Sigmund Freud Quotes

275 Sourced Quotes

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

Sigmund Freud
But man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

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
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
All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ... Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus... Rooms in dreams are usually women... Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing bridges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.

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
Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

Sigmund Freud
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

Sigmund Freud
In view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.

Sigmund Freud
The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

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

Sigmund Freud
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

Sigmund Freud
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

Sigmund Freud
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

Sigmund Freud
Yes, America is gigantic, but a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud
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.

Sigmund Freud
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

Sigmund Freud
It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe."

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

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