Sigmund Freud Quotes

The world is no nursery.

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.

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.

An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.

dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.

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.

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

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.

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.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

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?

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

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.

America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

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.

Christmas is the alcoholidays

all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states.

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.

Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.

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.

Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

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.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

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

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

Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.

The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.

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.

Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.

The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.

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

A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!

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

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of 'happiness': one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.

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

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

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.

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

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

Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity

If children could, if adults knew.