Sigmund Freud Quotes

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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
There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

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

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
We must begin to love in order not to fall ill.

Sigmund Freud
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

Sigmund Freud
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.

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
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

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

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
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
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
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
Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.

Sigmund Freud
A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness.

Sigmund Freud
To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.

Sigmund Freud