Sigmund Freud was a famous Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the school of thought known as psychoanalysis. His theories have been influential in psychology, psychiatry, and other fields, and his quotes are still widely read and quoted today.
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| Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength. ― Sigmund Freud |
Sigmund Freud quotes can be a valuable source of insight and inspiration, and they can help us to better understand ourselves and the world around us.
If you are interested in psychology, psychiatry, or simply in the human condition, then I encourage you to read some of Sigmund Freud quotes. You may be surprised at how much you find them to be thought-provoking and inspiring.
Here are some of Sigmund Freud most famous quotes: These quotes offer insights into Freud theories of the mind, the nature of human beings, and the importance of love and work in our lives.
Sigmund Freud Quotes and Sayings
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
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.
A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
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.
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.
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.
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| One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. ― Sigmund Freud |
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
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.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
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.
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 madman is a dreamer awake.
In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
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."
Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
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| Love and work... work and love, that's all there is. ― Sigmund Freud |
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
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.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
One is very crazy when in love.
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
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| Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. ― Sigmund Freud |
The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
The goal of all life is death.
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.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
If youth knew; if age could.
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| Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. ― Sigmund Freud |
Where id was, there ego shall be.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
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.
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.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
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.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea, they become powerless when they oppose it.
The ego is not master in its own house.
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.
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.
A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man.... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
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| A woman should soften but not weaken a man. ― Sigmund Freud |
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
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.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
It goes without saying that 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.
If you can't do it, give up!
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
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.
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
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| Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. ― Sigmund Freud |
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
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.
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.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
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.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Everyone owes nature a death.
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
Dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.
Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
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| We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. ― Sigmund Freud |
He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
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.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
If children could, if adults knew.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.
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.
In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.
Dreams are never concerned with trivia.
For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art.
Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
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.
Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.
We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.
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.
The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.
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.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair.
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 man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.
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.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality.... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
I may now add that 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.
It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Places are often treated like persons.
The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
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.
Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.
The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.
Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.
Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
At least one of the meanings of a symptom corresponds to the presentation of a sexual fantasy, while there is no such limit to the content of its other meanings.
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression.
The substitute gratifications, such as art offers, are illusions in contrast to reality, but none the less satisfying to the mind on that account, thanks to the place which phantasy has reserved for herself in mental life.
How far back into childhood do our memories reach?
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
Rather than living our lives, we are "lived" by unknown and uncontrollable forces.
Who lacks sex speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money - about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality.
According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.
A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements—at any rate, in certain fields ("Memory").
All who seek to be nobler than their constitution permits succumb to neurosis; they would have been better in health if they had found it possible to be morally worse.
Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.
The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.
Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor.
If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance.
If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends.
The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.
Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings.
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
The medical profession is justly conservative.
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.
Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.
Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.
Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.
We are never so vulnerable as when we love.
It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.
One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world.
Individual liberty is not an asset of civilization.
We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.
Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.
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 ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.
The profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Happiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish.
All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
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.
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.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
The delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.
The fact is that a survival of all the early stages alongside the final form is only possible in the mind, and that it is impossible for us to represent a phenomenon of this kind in visual terms.