Words matter. These are the best Sigmund Freud Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The ego is not master in its own house.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
One is very crazy when in love.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
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.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
If youth knew; if age could.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
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.
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
The goal of all life is death.
Anatomy is destiny.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
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.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
