Sigmund Freud Quotes

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

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

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.

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

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

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.

Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates.

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

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.

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.

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.

Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.

Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.

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

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."

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.

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.

Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.

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

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.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

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

Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

That which we can't remember, we will repeat.

The ego is not master in its own house.

The world is no nursery.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.

Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.

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

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?'

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