Sigmund Freud - Civilization and its Discontents (1930)

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The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

Sigmund Freud
In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.

Sigmund Freud
So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

Sigmund Freud
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.

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

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

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
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
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

Sigmund Freud
The first requisite of civilization…is that of justice.

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
We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast, and only very little from a state of things.

Sigmund Freud
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

Sigmund Freud
The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

Sigmund Freud
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

Sigmund Freud
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.

Sigmund Freud
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Sigmund Freud
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Sigmund Freud
Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.

Sigmund Freud
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Sigmund Freud