Sigmund Freud quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Sigmund Freud on Wise Famous Quotes.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.

Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.

The goal of all life is death.

All that matters is love and work.

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

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

Religious doctrines ... are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, "as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.

The world is no nursery.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

If you can't do it, give up!

Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct ...

Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is - art.

We must love or we grow ill.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.

I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

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

Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.

I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. [speaking about the Irish]

Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

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.

If one of us should die, then I shall move to Paris.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

But since Freud still conceives the mind as a closed system, desires are not expelled but only hidden away.

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

Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.

Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.

Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

The words for much that remains mute in me

Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

Love and work ... work and love, that's all there is.

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!

As these examples show, Freud's theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss

Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.

Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.

no serious book can now be sure of surviving.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.

Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.

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

All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity

When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

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

Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.

The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.

If children could, if adults knew.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.

The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.