Sigmund Freud - Human Quotes

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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
It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.

Sigmund Freud
Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

Sigmund Freud
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.

Sigmund Freud
The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.

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

Sigmund Freud
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.

Sigmund Freud
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

Sigmund Freud
Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.

Sigmund Freud
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Sigmund Freud
And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound.

Sigmund Freud
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Sigmund Freud
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

Sigmund Freud
The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young—a human activity which developed late.

Sigmund Freud