Sigmund Freud Quotes

Opposition is not necessarily enmity.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

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.

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.

Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.

By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.

One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.

Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.

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.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

If youth knew; if age could.

Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.

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

The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.

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

Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

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.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

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

We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

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

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

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

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?

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

Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

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.

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

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

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.

Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.

Not all men are worthy of love.

All that matters is love and work.

There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind - separate from the conscious mind that is constantly at work molding our thought, feelings, and actions.

A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.