Sigmund Freud Quotes

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

Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.

"He sido un hombre afortunado en la vida, nada me ha sido facil." "I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easy"

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.

Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.

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.

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

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.

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.

The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

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

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

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

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

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

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!

The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

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

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?

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

There are no mistakes.

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

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

A strong egoism is a protection.

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

Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.

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 psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

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

Now it is nothing but torture.

Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.

[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.

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.

public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

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