Sigmund Freud Quotes

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.

A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.

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

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

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.

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 woman should soften but not weaken a man.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

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

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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

Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.

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.

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.

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.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.

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

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

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.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

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

The ego is not master in its own house.

We must love or we grow ill.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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

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.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

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.

When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.

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.

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

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

When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

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

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

Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

If you can't do it, give up!

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.

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

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

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