Sigmund Freud Quotes
Most popular Sigmund Freud Quotes
Anatomy is destiny.
One is very crazy when in love.
Thought is action in rehearsal.
Thought is behavior in rehearsal.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity.
Neurosis seems to be a human privilege.
The ego is not master in its own house.
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
The first requisite of civilization ... is that of justice.
When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.
The mind is an iceberg - it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
The great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marriage bed.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security.
The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d'être, is to defend us against nature.
Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Chance, fate, nurturing an inner preparedness for change and direction — how can one disentangle them?
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
One cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Wit is the best safety valve the modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
They 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.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
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.
My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.
Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer . . . the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?
They complain of their illness but exploit it with all of their strength; and if someone tries to take it away from them they defend it like the proverbial lioness with her young.
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
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.
Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.
A neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and the id; the person is at war with himself. A psychosis is the outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the outside world.
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.
If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life—then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
The mind is an iceberg—it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.
