Famous Quotes by Sigmund Freud
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.”
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.”
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
The madman is a dreamer awake.”
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
Where id was, there ego shall be.”
The goal of all life is death.”
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?'
If you can't do it, give up!
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.”
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.”
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.”
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 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.”
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
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.”
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.”
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.”
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.”
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.”
If youth knew; if age could.”
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.”
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.”
One is very crazy when in love.”
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.”
The ego is not master in its own house.”
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.”
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.”
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.”
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.”
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.”
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.”
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.”
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.”
Anatomy is destiny.”
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.”
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.”