Quotes by Sigmund Freud

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 in their object-relations.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

Love is the great educator.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

I suppose that romantic love was invented as a brilliant means of seduction.

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.

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?

Dreams are the royal road to the unconcious.

What a distressing contrast is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Anatomy is destiny.

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.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

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

Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

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.

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

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.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge -- a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.

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

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.

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.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

Sexual morality -- as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it -- is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

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!

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.

The delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.

In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.

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.

Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

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.

I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion.

Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

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

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

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.

The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.

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.

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.

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.

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.

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.

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.

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.

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 surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.

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.

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

Our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.

It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

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.

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.

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?

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

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

I like to avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.

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.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

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.

The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization -- a kind of sublimation, therefore.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

Now it is nothing but torture.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

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.

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.

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.

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 unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

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.

When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.

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.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings.

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.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.

In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.

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.

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

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.

Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls was urgently necessary or society was doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

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.

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.

The whole thing religion is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.

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.

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

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.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

We cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another.

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.

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.

A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.

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.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

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.

My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.

We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of narcissistic psychoneuroses for these disorders.

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.

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.

Least of all should the artist be held responsible for the fate which befalls his works.

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.

By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.

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.

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.

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

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.

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 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.

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.

Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

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.

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.

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

I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.

It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.

Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.

So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.

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

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.

The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.

The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.

These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

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

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.

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

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.

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

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

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 you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.

The madman is a dreamer awake.

I've been a fortunate man in life. Nothing has come easily.

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.

The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.