Sigmund Freud

“The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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?’” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are never concerned with trivia.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I’ve been a fortunate man in life. Nothing has come easily.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The goal of all life is death.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A strong egoism is a protection.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Everyone owes nature a death.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Without love we fall ill.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Where id is, there shall ego be.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If youth knew; if age could.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash…” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion – in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The communists think they have found the way to redeem mankind from evil. Man is equivocally good and well disposed to his neighbour, but his nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property… I can recognize the psychological presumption behind it as a baseless illusion. With the abolition of private property the human love of aggression is robbed of one of its tools, a strong one no doubt, but certainly not the strongest… Aggression was not created by property.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“They love their delusions as they love themselves.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If you can’t do it, give up!” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“There are no mistakes.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such…” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Love and work, work and love… that’s all there is.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“One is very crazy when in love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Christmas is the alcoholidays.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Not all men are worthy of love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When people criticise me, I know how to defend myself. But I’m powerless in the face of praise.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Where id was, there ego shall be.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian – an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own… The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us O’er the world’s tempestuous sea; guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, for we have no help but thee.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion originates in the child’s and young mankind’s fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When we share – that is poetry in the prose of life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The madman is a dreamer awake.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever… because they already live in a dream world.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair;.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The scope of one’s personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If children could, if adults knew.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“History is just new people making old mistakes.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The ego is not master in its own house.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only person better you should be, this is who you are now.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim… to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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?” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Poets 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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young – a human activity which developed late.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can’t control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“That which we can’t remember, we will repeat.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it – the present, that is to say, must have become the past – before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The communal life of human beings had… a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“All that matters is love and work.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Time spent with cats is never wasted.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood – the time when he was his own ideal.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Rather than living our lives, we are ″lived″ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Least of all should the artist be held responsible for the fate which befalls his works.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life – it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“A father’s death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man’s life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Let us consider the polarity of love and hate… Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but… a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on… Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!” ~ Sigmund Freud

“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Happiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. – A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three… The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” ~ Sigmund Freud

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

“Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Love is a state of temporary psychosis.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“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.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The little child is above all shameless, and during its early years it evinces definite pleasure in displaying its body and especially its sexual organs. A counterpart to this desire which is to be considered as perverse, the curiosity to see other persons’ genitals, probably appears first in the later years of childhood when the hindrance of the feeling of shame has already reached a certain development.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. ‘For the little children do not like it’ when there is talk of man’s inborn tendency to ‘wickedness’, to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.“.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“Places are often treated like persons.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.” ~ Sigmund Freud