Famous Quotes

Quotes by Sigmund Freud

• A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
• America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
• Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
• Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
• Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
• Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
• Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
• Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
• I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
• 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.
• 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.
• If youth knew if age could.
• 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.
• Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
• Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.
• 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.
• Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
• Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
• 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.
• One is very crazy when in love.
• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
• The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
• 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 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?'
• The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
• The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
• The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
• Time spent with cats is never wasted.
• We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
• What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
• 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.
• Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.