Sigmund Freud Quotes

275 Sourced Quotes

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
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
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.

Sigmund Freud
The creative writer acts no differently from the child at play: he creates a fantasy world, which he takes very seriously; that is to say, he invests large amounts of emotion in it, while marking it off sharply from reality.

Sigmund Freud
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

Sigmund Freud
But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

Sigmund Freud
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Sigmund Freud
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

Sigmund Freud
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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
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
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
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.

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
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
Regarding what a normal person should be able to do:
To love and to work.

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