Sigmund Freud, known as the “Father of Psychoanalysis,” transformed our knowledge of the human mind. Freud was born in Austria in 1856. His revolutionary theories about the unconscious mind, psychosexual development, and the significance of dreams changed psychology and still have an impact on many other subjects today.
He proposed that unconscious tensions and wants play a substantial role in driving human behavior, introducing notions such as the id, ego, and superego. By examining these subconscious levels of the mind, Freud’s free association therapy approach attempted to reveal suppressed feelings and ideas.
All Time Famous Sigmund Freud Quotes
01. “La consciencia de la culpabilidad y el sentimiento del deber serían las dos propiedades características del animal gregario.”
― Sigmund Freud
02. “La multitud es un dócil rebaño incapaz de vivir sin amo.”
― Sigmund Freud
03. “Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.”
― Sigmund Freud
04. “We are astonished to hear declarations by married women and girls which bear witness to a quite particular attitude to the therapeutic problem: they had always known, they say, that they could only be cured by love.”
― Sigmund Freud
05. “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”
― Sigmund Freud
06. “At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side: tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.”
― Sigmund Freud
07. “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 things in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
08. “The dreams of little children are often simple fulfilments of wishes, and for this reason are, as compared with the dreams of adults, by no means interesting. They present no problem to be solved, but they are invaluable as affording proof that the dream, in its inmost essence, is the fulfilment of a wish.”
― Sigmund Freud
09. “Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy…”
― Sigmund Freud
10. “At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity7 of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination.”
― Sigmund Freud
11. “This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.”
― Sigmund Freud
12. “The thought suggests itself that a psychical power is operative in the dream-work which on the one hand strips the psychically valuable elements of their intensity, and on the other creates new values by way of over-determination out of elements of low value; it is the new values that then reach the dream-content.”
― Sigmund Freud
13. “most people report dreaming principally in visual images. Freud, however, assumes that dreams start from a dream-thought that is best expressed in words and translate it into a picture-language which is intellectually inferior because it cannot convey logical connections; the analyst restores to the dream its verbal character.”
― Sigmund Freud
14. “The first is the Credo quia absurdum of the early Father. It would imply that religious doctrines are outside reason’s jurisdiction; they stand above reason. Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.”
― Sigmund Freud
15. “The injunction that before making a final decision in any matter one should sleep on it for a night is obviously fully justified.”
― Sigmund Freud
16. “Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.”
― Sigmund Freud
17. “Não existe uma regra de ouro que se aplique a todos: todo homem tem de descobrir por si mesmo de que modo específico ele pode ser salvo”
― Sigmund Freud
18. “The great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life…Even as an adult he continued to play, and this is why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.”
― Sigmund Freud
19. “But hypnotism had been of immense help in the cathartic treatment, by widening the field of the patient’s consciousness and putting within his reach knowledge which he did not possess in his waking life. It seemed no easy task to find a substitute for it. While I was in this perplexity there came to my help the recollection of an experiment which I had often witnessed while I was with Bernheim. When the subject awoke from the state of somnambulism, he seemed to have lost all memory of what had happened while he was in that state. But Bernheim maintained that the memory was present all the same; and if he insisted on the subject remembering, if he asseverated that the subject knew it all and had only to say it, and if at the same time he laid his hand on the subject’s forehead, then the forgotten memories used in fact to return, hesitatingly at first, but eventually in a flood and with complete clarity. I determined that I would act the same way. My patients I reflected, must in fact ‘know’ all the things which had hitherto only been made accessible to them in hypnosis; and assurances and encouragement on my part, assisted perhaps by the touch of my hand, would, I thought, have the power of forcing the forgotten facts and connections into consciousness. No doubt this seemed a more laborious process than putting the patients into hypnosis, but it might prove highly instructive. So I abandoned hypnotism, only retaining my practice of requiring the patient to lie upon a sofa while I sat behind him, seeing him, but not seen myself.”
― Sigmund Freud
20. “transference”
― Sigmund Freud
21. “In so far as they have paid any attention to infantile sexuality the educators behave as if they shared our views concerning the formation of the moral forces of defence at the cost of sexuality, and as if they knew that sexual activity makes the child uneducable; for the educators consider all sexual manifestations of the child as an “evil” in the face of which little can be accomplished. We have, however, every reason for directing our attention to those phenomena so much feared by the educators, for we expect to find in them the solution of the primitive formation of the sexual impulse.”
― Sigmund Freud
22. “But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.”
― Sigmund Freud
23. “I must confess that I am not at all partial to the fabrication of Weltanschauungen. Such activities may be left to philosophers, who avowedly find it impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker of that kind to give them information on every subject. Let us humbly accept the contempt with which they look down on us from the vatnage-ground of their superior needs. But since we cannot forgot our narcissistic pride either, we will draw comfort from the reflection that such ‘Handbooks to Life’ soon grow out of date and that it is precisely our short-sighted, narrow, and finicky work which obliges them to appear in new editions, and that even the most up-to-date of them are nothing but attempts to find a substitute for the ancient, useful and all-sufficient Church Catechism. We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose.”
― Sigmund Freud
24. “The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried”
― Sigmund Freud
25. “every individual is virtually an enemy of culture, which is nevertheless ostensibly an object of universal human concern. It is remarkable that little as men are able to exist in isolation they should yet feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices that culture expects of them in order that a communal existence may be possible. Thus culture must be defended against the individual,”
― Sigmund Freud
26. “Cowabunga”
― Sigmund Freud
27. “Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be”
― Sigmund Freud
28. “What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one.”
― Sigmund Freud
29. “It would seem more appropriate not to speak of degeneration: (1) Where there are not many marked deviations from the normal; (2) where the capacity for working and living do not in general appear markedly impaired”
― Sigmund Freud
30. “As these examples show, Freud’s theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.”
― Sigmund Freud
31. “So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.”
― Sigmund Freud
32. “[I]n scientific matters it is always experience, and never authority without experience, that gives the final verdict, whether in favour or against.”
― Sigmund Freud
33. “For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future.”
― Sigmund Freud
34. “The uneducated relatives of our patients—persons who are impressed only by the visible and tangible, preferably by such procedure as one sees in the moving picture theatres—never miss an opportunity of voicing their scepticism as to how one can “do anything for the malady through mere talk.” Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients “merely imagine” their symptoms. Words”
― Sigmund Freud
35. “psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.”
― Sigmund Freud
36. “the principle which controls magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is “Omnipotence of Thought.”
― Sigmund Freud
37. “An anticathexis of this kind is clearly seen in obsessional neurosis. It appears there in the form of an alteration of the ego, as a reaction-formation in the ego, and is effected by the reinforcement of the attitude which is the opposite of the instinctual trend that has to be repressed—as, for instance, in pity, conscientiousness and cleanliness.”
― Sigmund Freud
38. “So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it.”
― Sigmund Freud
39. “Psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.”
― Sigmund Freud
40. “Mientras que durante la vigilia piensa y representa el alma en imágenes verbales y por medio del lenguaje, en el sueño piensa y representa en verdaderas imágenes sensoriales (pág. 35). Además, hallamos en el sueño una consciencia del espacio, pues, análogamente a como sucede en la vigilia, quedan las imágenes y sensaciones proyectadas en un espacio exterior (pág. 36). Habremos, pues, de confesar que el alma se halla en el sueño, y con respecto a sus imágenes y percepciones, en idéntica situación que durante la vida despierta (pág. 43).”
― Sigmund Freud
41. “Emoções não expressadas jamais morrem. Elas são enterradas vivas e voltarão mais tarde, mais feias.”
― Sigmund Freud
42. “contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to them dreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding from the senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or are accidental disturbances of his internal organs.”
― Sigmund Freud
43. “We possess no criterion which enables us to distinguish exactly between a psychical process and a physiological one, between an act occurring in the cerebral cortex and one occurring in the sub-cortical substance; for ‘consciousness’, whatever that may be, is not attached to every activity of the cerebral cortex, nor is it always attached in an equal degree to any particular one of its activities; it is not a thing which is bound up with any locality in the nervous system.”
― Sigmund Freud
44. “The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, “as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.”
― Sigmund Freud
45. “Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.”
― Sigmund Freud
46. “The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream.”
― Sigmund Freud
47. “O intalnire cu filozoful William James mi-a lasat o impresie de neuitat. Nu am putut sa nu tin minte aceasta scena: in cursul unei plimbari, el s-a oprit deodata, mi-a incredintat servieta si m-a rugat sa continui drumul, el avand sa ma urmeze de indata ce ii va fi trecut criza de anghina pectorala pe care o presimtea. A murit de inima un an mai tarziu; n-am incetat sa-mi doresc un asemenea curaj in fata sfarsitului apropiat.”
― Sigmund Freud
48. “It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.”
― Sigmund Freud
49. “The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish, which then allowed it, though already properly prepared, to “originate” for consciousness.”
― Sigmund Freud
50. “But even so, one can just as well hold God responsible for the existence of the devil as for the evil he personifies.”
― Sigmund Freud
51. “The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
― Sigmund Freud
52. “We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.”
― Sigmund Freud
53. “We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo’s deep words recalling Hamlet’s speech “is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience.” Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these “reasons of nature” force themselves into experience.”
― Sigmund Freud
54. “The reaction to these claims of impulse and these threats of danger, a reaction in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested, may be guided correctly by the pleasure-principle or by the reality-principle which modifies this.”
― Sigmund Freud
55. “a materialization of our conscience, of the severe super-ego within us, in which the punitive agency of our childhood finds residual expression.”
― Sigmund Freud
56. “Everywhere I go deep, I find a poet there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
57. “repression—which we must carefully note is not a suspension. The excitations in question are produced as usual but are prevented from attaining their aim by psychic hindrances, and are driven off into many other paths until they express themselves in a symptom.”
― Sigmund Freud
58. “Quite unlike conscious memories from the time of maturity, they are not fixed at the moment of being experienced and afterwards repeated, but are only elicited at a later age when childhood is already past; in the process they are altered and falsified, and are put into the service of later trends, so that generally speaking they cannot be sharply distinguished from phantasies. Their nature is perhaps best illustrated by a comparison with the way in which the writing of history originated among the peoples of antiquity. As long as a nation was small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its history. Men tilled the soil of their land, fought for their existence against their neighbours, and tried to gain territory from them and to acquire wealth. It was an age of heroes not of historians. Then came another age, an age of reflection: men felt themselves to be rich and powerful, and now felt a need to learn where they had come from and how they had developed.”
― Sigmund Freud
59. “The details of the process by which repression changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of ‘pain’ are not yet fully understood, or are not yet capable of clear presentation, but it is certain that all neurotic ‘pain’ is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such.”
― Sigmund Freud
60. “A normal dream stands, as it were, on two feet, one of which derives from the actual nature of the occasion for it, the other on a childhood event with serious consequences.”
― Sigmund Freud
61. “How we who have little belief envy those who are convinced of the existence of a Supreme Power, for whom the world holds no problems because He Himself has created all its institutions!”
― Sigmund Freud
62. “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they become powerless when they oppose it. Psycho-analysis will survive this loss and gain new adherents in place of these. In conclusion, I can only express a wish that fortune may grant an agreeable upward journey to all those who have found their stay in the underworld of psycho-analysis too uncomfortable for their taste. The rest of us, I hope, will be permitted without hindrance to carry through to their conclusion our labours in the depths.”
― Sigmund Freud
63. “Algı , Ben için, O’da güdülerin oynadığı role karşılık gelir. Tutkuları içinde barındıran O’nun tersine, Ben akıl ve sağduyu olarak adlandırdıklarımızı temsil eder. Tüm bunlar herkesçe bilinen popüler farklarla örtüşür, ama yalnızca ortalama ya da ideal durumda doğru olarak kabul edilmelidir.”
sayfa 49”
― Sigmund Freud
64. “Therefore, let us not undervalue small signs; perhaps by means of them we will succeed in getting on the track of greater things.”
― Sigmund Freud
65. “But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society”
― Sigmund Freud
66. “A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been resolved and the spell broken.”
― Sigmund Freud
67. “The act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union.”
― Sigmund Freud
68. “The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.”
― Sigmund Freud
69. “The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in care and love which is connected with this event, cause the child to become thoughtful and sagacious. Corresponding with the history of this awakening, the first problem with which it occupies itself is not the question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from where do children come?”
― Sigmund Freud
70. “Pues allí donde el amor despierta, muere el yo, déspota, sombrío.
(Observaciones psicoanalíticas sobre un caso de paranoia (Caso “Schreber”)”
― Sigmund Freud
71. “WE think we have advanced too rapidly. Let us go back a little. Before our last attempt to overcome the difficulties of dream distortion through our technique, we had decided that it would be best to avoid them by limiting ourselves only to those dreams in which distortion is either entirely absent or of trifling importance, if there are such. But here again we digress from the history of the evolution of our knowledge, for as a matter of fact we become aware of dreams entirely free of distortion only after the consistent application of our method of interpretation and after complete analysis of the distorted dream.”
― Sigmund Freud
72. “Anyone thus forced to react continually to precepts that are not the expressions of his impulses lives, psychologically speaking, above his means, and may be objectively described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly conscious of this difference or not. It is undeniable that our contemporary civilization favors this sort of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent. One might even venture to assert that it is built upon such a hypocrisy and would have to undergo extensive changes if man were to undertake to live according to the psychological truth. There are therefore more civilized hypocrites than truly cultured persons”
― Sigmund Freud
73. “…El hecho de que uno entable correspondencia con el ausente, con quien no puede hablar, no es menos natural que el de tratar de hacerse entender por escrito cuando uno ha perdido la voz.”
― Sigmund Freud
74. “Thought is action in rehearsal.”
― Sigmund Freud
75. “Constitution and Heredity.—In the first place, we must mention here the congenital variation of the sexual constitution, upon which the greatest weight probably falls, but the existence of which, as may be easily understood, can be established only through its later manifestations and even then not always with great certainty. We understand by it a preponderance of one or another of the manifold sources of the sexual excitement, and we believe that such a difference of disposition must always come to expression in the final result, even if it should remain within normal limits.”
― Sigmund Freud
76. “The little child is above all shameless, and during its early years it evinces definite pleasure in displaying its body and especially its sexual organs. A counterpart to this desire which is to be considered as perverse, the curiosity to see other persons’ genitals, probably appears first in the later years of childhood when the hindrance of the feeling of shame has already reached a certain development.”
― Sigmund Freud
77. “en cuanto cierto número de seres vivos se reúne, trátese de un rebaño o de una multitud humana, los elementos individuales se colocan instintivamente bajo la autoridad de un jefe.”
― Sigmund Freud
78. “From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death.”
― Sigmund Freud
79. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy, and let us be satisfied if we may be auditors of the words which are exchanged between the analyst and his patient.”
― Sigmund Freud
80. “What one forgets once he will often forget again.”
― Sigmund Freud
81. “To love one’s neighbour as oneself — a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to the original nature of man.”
― Sigmund Freud
82. “A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.”
― Sigmund Freud
83. “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.”
― Sigmund Freud
84. “Nonostante tutte le approssimazioni e anticipazioni nel mondo circostante, fu nello spirito di un uomo ebreo, Saulo di Tarso, che per la prima volta si affacciò l’idea: «Siamo così infelici perché abbiamo ucciso Dio Padre».”
― Sigmund Freud
85. “Alongside of the physical symptoms of hysteria, a number of psychical disturbances are to be observed, in which at some future time the changes characteristic of hysteria will no doubt be found but the analysis of which has hitherto scarcely been begun. These are changes in the passage and in the association of ideas, inhibitions of the activity of the will, magnification and suppression of feelings, etc. — which may be summarized as “changes in the normal distribution over the nervous system of the stable amounts of excitation”.”
― Sigmund Freud
86. “The superego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.”
― Sigmund Freud
87. “We avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life.”
― Sigmund Freud
88. “We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
― Sigmund Freud
89. “Yet we see, on the contrary, that many acts are most successfully carried out when they are not the objects of particularly concentrated attention, and that the mistakes occur just at the point where one is most anxious to be accurate—where a distraction of the necessary attention is therefore surely least permissible. One could then say that this is the effect of the “excitement,” but we do not understand why the excitement does not intensify the concentration of attention on the goal that is so much desired.”
― Sigmund Freud
90. “But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even this dreaded event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an ancient Etruscan grave, into which he has descended, happy in the satisfaction it has given to his archaeological interests. Similarly man makes the forces of nature not simply in the image of men with whom he can associate as his equals—that would not do justice to the overpowering impression they make on him—but he gives them the characteristics of the father, makes them into gods, thereby following not only an infantile, but also, as I have tried to show, a phylogenetic prototype. In”
― Sigmund Freud
91. “In tal modo era taciuta l’uccisione di Dio, ma un crimine la cui espiazione richiedeva che una vittima fosse immolata non poteva esser stato che un omicidio.”
― Sigmund Freud
92. “The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream ‘No’ does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.”
― Sigmund Freud
93. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”
― Sigmund Freud
94. “we shall be obliged to put forward a set of new assumptions touching speculatively on the structure of the psychical apparatus and the play of forces active in it, though we must take care not to spin them out too far beyond their first logical links, for if we do, their worth will vanish into uncertainty.”
― Sigmund Freud
95. “The fact is that a survival of all the early stages alongside the final form is only possible in the mind, and that it is impossible for us to represent a phenomenon of this kind in visual terms.”
― Sigmund Freud
96. “Uno es dueño de lo que calla y esclavo de lo que habla”
― Sigmund Freud
97. “El sueño posee una maravillosa poesía, una exacta facultad alegórica, un humorismo incomparable y una deliciosa ironía.”
― Sigmund Freud
98. “Nuestra alma no es una unidad pacífica, autorregulada. Ella es, antes bien, comparable a un Estado moderno, en el que una chusma ansiosa de placer y de destrucción tiene que ser sojuzgada por una clase superior y más juiciosa”
― Sigmund Freud
99. “الطفل ما هو إلا رجلٌ صغير أو بمعنى آخر : الرجل صورةٌ مكبَّرة للطفل الصغير”
― Freud Sigmund
100. “Uma técnica bem comum de distorção onírica consiste em representar o resultado de um acontecimento ou a conclusão de uma cadeia de pensamento no início de um sonho e em colocar em seu final as premissas nas quais se basearam a conclusão ou as causas que levaram ao acontecimento.”
― Sigmund Freud
101. “It is a fact that we have always behaved as if we knew all this; but, for the most part, our theoretical concepts have neglected to attach the same importance to the economic line of approach as they have to the dynamic and topographical ones.”
― Sigmund Freud
102. “In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.”
― Sigmund Freud
103. “We will turn, therefore, to the less ambitious problem: what the behaviour of men themselves reveals as the purpose and object of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so.”
― Sigmund Freud
104. “The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature, will follow it there.”
― Sigmund Freud
105. “I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador…with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.”
― Sigmund Freud
106. “No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; 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.”
― Sigmund Freud
107. “Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud
108. “Nella nostra concezione moderna del mondo ―concezione scientifica non ancora definitivamente conclusa― la superstizione è un po’ fuori luogo; mentre era ammessa nella concezione di epoche prescientifiche, poiché ne era un complemento logico. Aveva dunque relativamente ragione l’antico Romano, che rinunciava ad un progetto importante perché il volo degli uccelli era sfavorevole; agiva in modo conforme alle sue premesse. E se rinunciava al suo progetto perché aveva inciampato sulla soglia della sua porta, si rivelava superiore a noi increduli, si rivelava miglior psicologo di noi. Il fatto d’inciampare denotava l’esistenza di un dubbio, di un’opposizione interiore a questo progetto, la cui forza poteva annullare quella della sua intenzione al momento della realizzazione. In effetti si può essere sicuri del successo completo solo quando tutte le energie psichiche tendono al fine desiderato.”
― Sigmund Freud
109. “At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea. We”
― Sigmund Freud
110. “At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea.”
― Sigmund Freud
111. “The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time, it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expression of opinion, which render the minds of those who are, thus, intellectually repressed, defenseless against every unfavorable situation, and every wild rumor.”
― Sigmund Freud
112. “We know that the first step towards attaining intellectual mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations, rules and laws which bring order into chaos. In doing this we simplify the world of phenomena; but we cannot avoid falsifying it, especially if we are dealing with the process of development and change. What we are concerned with is discerning a qualitative alteration, and as a rule in doing so we neglect, at any rate to begin with, a quantitative factor.”
― Sigmund Freud
113. “It may be said that hysteria is as ignorant of the science of the structure of the nervous system as we ourselves before we have learnt it.”
― Sigmund Freud
114. “Cat priveste coordonatele intinse intre psihanaliza si filozofia lui Schopenhauer el nu numai ca a aparat intaietatea afectivitatii si importanta preponderenta a sexualitatii, dar a ghicit chiar mecanismul refularii; nu mi-au permis insa sa le cunosc doctrina. L-am citit pe Schopenhauer foarte tarziu. Pe Nietzsche, celalalt filosof ale carui intentii si puncte de vedere concorda adesea in maniera cea mai uimitoare cu rezultatele greu cucerite ale pishanalizei, l-am evitat mult timp tocmai din aceasta cauza; tin deci, mai putin la intaietate, dorind sa raman liber de orice prevenire.”
― Sigmund Freud
115. “Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.”
― Sigmund Freud
116. “Least of all should the artist be held responsible for the fate which befalls his works.”
― Sigmund Freud
117. “To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.”
― Sigmund Freud
118. “Nikada nismo tako slabo zaštićeni od patnje,kao onda kada volimo.”
― Freud Sigmund
119. “religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more.”
― Sigmund Freud
120 “Freud gave these conceptions spatial form because he still thought, as in his ‘Project’, that it would eventually be possible to locate them within the brain as described by neurology.”
― Sigmund Freud
121. “In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.”
― Sigmund Freud
122. “the process of dreaming transfers psychical intensity from what is important, but also objectionable, onto what is insignificant.”
― Sigmund Freud
123. “The normal sequence is that energy is prompted at the perceptual system, passes into consciousness, and thence to the motor system, where it is discharged by action. (I feel an unpleasant sensation, realize that I have been bitten by a mosquito, raise my hand, and swat the insect.)”
― Sigmund Freud
124. “character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerly anal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal eroticism”
― Sigmund Freud
125. “…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.”
― Sigmund Freud
126. “One can make a compound formation of events and of places in the same way as of people, provided always that the single events and localities have something in common which the latent dream emphasizes. It is a sort of new and fleeting concept of formation, with the common element as its kernel. This jumble of details that has been fused together regularly results in a vague indistinct picture, as though you had taken several pictures on the same film.”
― Sigmund Freud
127. “If we thus recognise
that the aim is to equip the group with the
attributes of the individual, we shall be reminded
of a valuable remark of Trotter’s, to the effect that
the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically
a continuation of the multicellular character
of all the higher organisms.”
― Sigmund Freud
128. “We may say that the patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it.”
― Sigmund Freud
129. “It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life’s struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.”
― Sigmund Freud
130. “The greater the resistance, the more thoroughly remembering will be replaced by acting out (repetition)….he repeats everything deriving from the repressed element within himself that has already established itself in his manifest personality.”
― Sigmund Freud
131. “Our first answer must be that the dream has no means at its disposal among the dream-thoughts of representing these logical relations. Mostly it disregards all these terms and takes over only the factual substance of the dream-thoughts to work upon. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to re-establish the connections which the dream-work has destroyed. This inability to express such relations must be due to the nature of the psychical material which goes to make the dream. After all, the fine arts, painting and sculpture, are subject to a similar limitation in comparison with literature, which can make use of speech. Here too the cause of the incapacity lies in the material which both arts use as their medium of expression.”
― Sigmund Freud
132. “Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied with him: ‘Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!’ So too our fugitive threw himself with special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It was possible to establish two of these problems; ‘Two bodies come together, one with a speed of … etc’ and ‘On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is m, describe a cone … etc’ Other people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too.”
― Sigmund Freud
133. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come… you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”
― Sigmund Freud
134. “And I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and if they haven’t died, they are still alive today.”
― Sigmund Freud
135. “In this scheme, the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘preconscious’ are agencies or authorities (Instanzen) which the wish has to satisfy; the unconscious is more tolerant, and helps the wish to smuggle itself past the censorship of the preconscious. As a result, psychical energy is discharged without disturbing sleep.”
― Sigmund Freud
136. “It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man’s need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for him a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.”
― Sigmund Freud
137. “The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.”
― Sigmund Freud
138. “There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs. If”
― Sigmund Freud
139. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”
― Sigmund Freud
140. “Primitive man was as incapable of imagining and realizing his own death as any one of us are today. But a case arose in which the two opposite attitudes towards death clashed and came into conflict with each other, with results that are both significant and far reaching. Such a case was given when primitive man saw one of his own relatives die, his wife, child, or friend, whom he certainly loved as we do ours; for love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder. In his pain he must have discovered that he, too, could die, an admission against which his whole being must have revolted, for everyone of these loved ones was a part of his own beloved self. On the other hand again, every such death was satisfactory to him, for there was also something foreign in each one of these persons. The law of emotional ambivalence, which today still governs our emotional relations to those whom we love, certainly obtained far more widely in primitive times. The beloved dead had nevertheless roused some hostile feelings in primitive man just because they had been both friends and enemies.”
― Sigmund Freud
141. “It was not the intellectual puzzle or any particular death which roused the spirit of inquiry in man, but the conflict of emotions at the death of beloved and withal foreign and hated persons.
― Sigmund Freud
115. “Historical writing, which had begun to keep a continuous record of the present, now also cast a glance back to the past, gathered traditions and legends, interpreted the traces of antiquity that survived in customs and usages, and in this way created a history of the past. It was inevitable that this early history should have been an expression of present beliefs and wishes rather than a true picture of the past; for many things had been dropped from the nation’s memory, while others were distorted, and some remains of the past were given a wrong interpretation in order to fit in with contemporary ideas. Moreover people’s motive for writing history was not objective curiosity but a desire to influence their contemporaries, to encourage and inspire them, or to hold a mirror up before them. A man’s conscious memory of the events of his maturity is in every way comparable to the first kind of historical writing [which was a chronicle of current events]; while the memories that he has of his childhood correspond, as far as their origins and reliability are concerned, to the history of a nation’s earliest days, which was compiled later and for tendentious reasons.”
― Sigmund Freud
116. “I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time.”
― Sigmund Freud
117. “Cruelty is especially near the childish character, since the inhibition which restrains the impulse to mastery before it causes pain to others—that is, the capacity for sympathy—develops comparatively late. As we know, a thorough psychological analysis of this impulse has not as yet been successfully accomplished; we may assume that the cruel feelings emanate from the impulse to mastery and appear at a period in the sexual life before the genitals have taken on their later rôle. It then dominates a phase of the sexual life, which we shall later describe as the pregenital organization. Children who are distinguished for evincing especial cruelty to animals and playmates may be justly suspected of intensive and premature sexual activity in the erogenous zones; and in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of the barrier of sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections between cruelty and the erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be broken in later life.”
― Sigmund Freud
118. “The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.”
― Sigmund Freud
119. “In his description of the melancholic, Freud says that such patients are particularly perceptive with respect to their self-image:
When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself: we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.”
― Sigmund Freud
120. “the dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought”
― Sigmund Freud
121. “Couldn’t I for once have you and the work at the same time?”
― Sigmund Freud
122. “Happiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish.”
― Sigmund Freud
123. “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”
― Sigmund Freud
124. “Parfois un cigar est seulement un cigar comme dit Freud, mais aussi Clinton !”
― Freud Sigmund
125. “But since Freud still conceives the mind as a closed system, desires are not expelled but only hidden away.”
― Sigmund Freud
126. “The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them.”
― Sigmund Freud
127. “O homem não tem nada melhor para fazer do que tentar estar em perfeito acordo consigo mesmo.”
― Sigmund Freud
128. “…what the behavior of men themselves reveals as the purpose and object of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and remain so.”
― Sigmund Freud
129. “his understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as “the father of psychoanalysis” and his work has been highly influential-—popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature (Kafka), film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. Source: Wikipedia”
― Sigmund Freud
130.“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
131. “If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance.”
― Sigmund Freud
132. “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.”
― Sigmund Freud
133. “The way in which these factors—displacement, condensation, and over-determination—interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.”
― Sigmund Freud
134. “As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.”
― Sigmund Freud
135. “Cercetand situatiile patogene in care refularile sexualitatii avusesera loc si ale caror simptome pareau formatii substitutive ale refulatului, se mergea spre perioadele mai timpurii ale vietii bolnavului si se ajungea in cele din urma la primii ani ai copilariei sale. Si se descoperea – ceea ce de altfel romancierii si cunoscatorii sufletului uman stiau de mult timp – ca impresiile din aceasta prima perioada a vietii, chiar daca in majoritatea cazurilor erau uitate, lasau urme adanci care influenteaza dezvoltarea individului, in particular pregatind dispozitia individului pentru nevroza ulterioara.”
― Sigmund Freud
136. “Then, when the entire mass of these dream-thoughts is subject to the pressure of the dream-work, and the pieces are whirled about, broken up, and pushed up against one another, rather like ice-floes surging down a river, the question arises: what has become of the bonds of logic which had previously given the structure its form?”
― Sigmund Freud
137. “Prin metoda asocierii libere si prin tehnica de interpretare care i se adauga, psihanaliza reuseste sa faca un lucru care nu parea pre important din punct de vedere practic, dar care trebuia in realitate sa duca la o pozitie si o valorificare cu totul noi in evolutia stiintei. A devenit posibil sa se dovedeasca ca visurile au un sens si sa se ghiceasca acest sens. In antichitatea clasica, visurile erau considerate adesea previziuni ale viitorului; stiinta moderna nu voia sa auda de visuri, le lega de domeniul superstitiei, declarandu-le un simplu act «corporal», un soi de tresarire a vietii psihice, de altfel adormite. Parea sa fie exclusa posibilitatea ca un savant care a facut deja lucrari stiintifice serioase sa poata aparea ca un «interpretator de visuri». Dar din moment ce nu era luata in seama dispretuirea visului si era tratat ca un simptom nevrotic neinteles, ca o idee deliranta sau obsesiva care, indepartandu-se de continutul sau aparent, lua ca obiect al asocierii libere imaginile sale izolate, atunci se ajungea la un cu totul alt rezultat. Se ajungea prin urmatoarele asocieri ale celui care visa, la constientizarea unor ansambluri de ganduri care nu mai puteau fi numite absurde sau confuze, care corespuneau unui act psihic de mare valoare si ale carui vis manifest nu era decat o traducere deformata, trunchiata sau rau inteleasa, cel mai adesea o traducere in imagini vizuale. Aceste ganduri latente ale visului contineau sensul visului, continutul manifest al visului nefiind decat o iluzie, o fatada de unde putea pleca asocierea cu adevarul dar nu si interpretarea.”
― Sigmund Freud
138. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”
― Sigmund Freud
139. “the renunciation of aggression is inherent in its constitution.”
― Sigmund Freud
140. “May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become ‘neurotic’?”
― Sigmund Freud
141. “It is therefore inevitable that we should seek compensation for the loss of life in the world of fiction, in literature, and in the theater. There we still find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us. It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match. In the realm of fiction we find the many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero.”
― Sigmund Freud
142. “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”
― Sigmund Freud
143. “Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”
― Sigmund Freud
144. “Religion … imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner – which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.”
― Sigmund Freud
145. “That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. ‘For the little children do not like it’ when there is talk of man’s inborn tendency to ‘wickedness’, to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.”
― Sigmund Freud
146. “Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.”
― Sigmund Freud
147. “scientific knowledge has taught [humans] much since the days of the Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: ‘We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows.”
― Sigmund Freud
118. “They love their delusions as they love themselves.”
― Sigmund Freud
119. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.”
― Sigmund Freud
120. “If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into hap-hazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, thought they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental paitents are split and broken structures of this same kind…. They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, physical reality…”
― Sigmund Freud
121. “Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built.”
― Sigmund Freud
122. “In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. […] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”
― Sigmund Freud
123. “According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.”
― Sigmund Freud
124. “Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.”
― Sigmund Freud
125. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
126. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
127. “There is only one state- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.”
― Sigmund Freud
128. “The dream shows how recollections of one’s everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended.”
― Sigmund Freud
129. “Woman … what does she want?”
― Sigmund Freud
130. “Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud
131. “Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken off; and that these people either do everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.
It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God’s kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.”
― Sigmund Freud
132. “Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited – and indeed the threat to it is great enough – then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.”
― Sigmund Freud
132. “Freud said to Putnam: “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
133. “A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.”
― Sigmund Freud
134. “It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.”
― Sigmund Freud
135. “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that [humans] are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. … 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.”
― Sigmund Freud
136. “How far back into childhood do our memories reach?”
― Sigmund Freud
137. “A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements—at any rate, in certain fields (“Memory”).”
― Sigmund Freud
138. “ان الذي نظنه لغزاً في الحلم , لابد أن يكون ذكرى واقعية منسية !”
― Sigmund Freud
139. “Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.”
― Sigmund Freud
140. “If one of us should die, then I shall move to Paris.”
― Sigmund Freud
141. “Rather than living our lives, we are ”lived” by unknown and uncontrollable forces.”
― Sigmund Freud
142. “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
143. “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud
144. “The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.”
― Sigmund Freud
145. “Every man is a poet at heart.”
― Sigmund Freud
146. “It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement.”
― Sigmund Freud
147. “Human’s intrinsic nature manifest in it’s misunderstandings”
― Sigmund Freud
148. “I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.”
― Sigmund Freud
149. “Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.”
― Sigmund Freud
150. “When it comes to the small matters in life one should think long and hard, but when it comes to the big ones -whether or not to marry, whether to have children- one should just go ahead and do it”
― Sigmund Freud
151. “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.”
― Sigmund Freud
152. “The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.”
― Sigmund Freud
153. “Cand se cerceteaza gandurile aflate prin analiza visului, se descopera unul care se detaseaza net de altele, inteligibile si bine cunoscute de cel care doarme. Aceste alte ganduri sunt ramasite ale vietii treze (ramasite diurne); in gandul izolat se recunoaste o dorinta adesea foarte socanta, straina starii de trezire a celui care viseaza, si pe care el o intampina, prin urmare, prin tagaduiri uimite su indignate. Aceasta dorinta este elementul propriu-zis care formeaza visul, furnizeaza energia necesara producerii visului si se serveste de ramasitele diurne ca de un simplu materia; visul, astfel constituit, reprezinta o situatie in care aceasta dorinta este satisfacuta; visul este realizarea acestei dorinte.”
― Sigmund Freud
154. “Visul este realizarea mascata a unei dorinte refulate. Este construit ca un simptom nevrotic, este o formatie de compromis intre necesitatea unei aspiratii instinctive refulate si rezistenta unei puteri cenzurate in eu. In virtutea unei origini asemanatoare el este la fel de incomprehensibil ca si simptomul si necesita, ca si acesta, o interpretare.”
― Sigmund Freud
155. “Of course it would not occur to us to doubt the importance, experimentally demonstrated, of external sensory stimuli during sleep, but we have given this material the same place relative to the dream-wish as we have the remnants of thought left over from the work of the day. We do not need to dispute that the dream interprets the objective sensory stimulus as if it were an illusion; but where the authorities left the motive for this interpretation uncertain, we have put it in.”
― Sigmund Freud
156. “This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind’s constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.
Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it.”
― Sigmund Freud
157. “Ko postavlja pitanje o smislu zivota,s njegovim libidom nije nesto u redu.”
― Sigmund Freud
158. “Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient’s recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.”
― Sigmund Freud
159. “The normal sequence is that energy is prompted at the perceptual system, passes into consciousness, and thence to the motor system, where it is discharged by action. (I feel an unpleasant sensation, realize that I have been bitten by a mosquito, raise my hand, and swat the insect.) But in dreaming energy flows the other way. Barred by the censor from consciousness, and hence from discharge through action, wishes flow back, collecting unconscious memories on their way, and present themselves once again, now transformed by the dream-work, to the sleeper’s lowered consciousness.”
― Sigmund Freud
160. “no one who still shares a delusion will ever recognize it as such.”
― Sigmund Freud
161. “[Reliģija]. Šo providenci vienkāršais cilvēks nevar iedomāties citādi kā vien ārkārtīgi kāpinātā tēva personā. Tikai tāds var zināt cilvēkbērna vajadzības, to var atmaidzināt ar savām lūgsnām, remdēt ar savas uzticības zīmēm. Tas viss ir tik acīmredzami infantili, tik svešs īstenībai, ka filantropiski noskaņotajam kļūst sāpīgi domāt, ka vairums mirstīgo nekad nepacelsies virs šīs dzīves izpratnes.”
― Sigmund Freud
162. “If we avail ourselves for a moment longer of the right to elaborate from the dream interpretation such far-reaching psychological speculations, we are in duty bound to demonstrate that we are thereby bringing the dream into a relationship which may also comprise other psychic structures.”
― Sigmund Freud
163. “Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
164. “Most importantly, the very inception of the treatment itself necessarily induces a change in the patient’s conscious attitude to his illness…that he does not listen carefully enough to what he obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse.”
― Sigmund Freud
165. “We are never so vulnerable as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud
166. “It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among p. 31 the mass-delusions of this kind.”
― Sigmund Freud
167. “Hence, it is quite conceivable that even the sense of guilt engendered by civilization is not recognized as such, but remains for the most part unconscious, or manifests itself as an unease, a discontent, for which other motivations are sought. The religions, at least, have never ignored the part that a sense of guilt plays in civilization. Moreover – a point I failed to appreciate earlier – they claim to redeem humanity from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the way in which this redemption is achieved in Christianity – through the sacrificial death of one man, who thereby takes upon himself the guilt shared by all – we drew an inference as to what may have been the original occasion for our acquiring this primordial guilt, which also marked the beginning of civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
168. “Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.”
― Sigmund Freud
169. “Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence.”
― Sigmund Freud
170. “Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongation of those feelings into the consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious”
― Sigmund Freud
171. “Under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the ‘reality-principle ‘, which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction, the renunciation of manifold possibilities of it, and the temporary endurance of ‘pain’ on the long and circuitous road to pleasure. The pleasure-principle however remains for a long time the method of operation of the sex impulses, which are not so easily educable, and it happens over and over again that whether acting through these impulses or operating in the ego itself it prevails over the reality-principle to the detriment of the whole organism.”
― Sigmund Freud
172. “Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”
― Sigmund Freud
173. “In this situation, what we call natural ethics has nothing to offer but the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think one is better than others. This is where ethics based on religion enters the scene with its promises of a better life hereafter. I am inclined to think that, for as long as virtue goes unrewarded here below, ethics will preach in vain.”
― Sigmund Freud
174. “It has long been our contention that ‘ dread of society [soziale Angsty is the essence of what is called conscience.”
― Sigmund Freud
175. “Not that I know so much, but there are so many equally valid possibilities. For the present I do not believe that anyone is justified in saying that sexuality is the mother of all feelings.”
― Sigmund Freud
176. “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud
177. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud
178. “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud
179. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud
180. “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud
181. “Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud
182. “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
― Sigmund Freud
183. “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud
184. “A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud
185. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
186. “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
187. “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 necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud
188. “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
189. “In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”
― Sigmund Freud
190. “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
― Sigmund Freud
191. “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
― Sigmund Freud
192. “Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud
193. “The madman is a dreamer awake”
― Sigmund Freud
194. “It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant… is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires – or forbidden to him – he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times… Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man’s likeness to a god still more.”
― Sigmund Freud
195. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
― Sigmund Freud
196. “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.”
― Sigmund Freud
197. “Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.”
― Sigmund Freud
198. “Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. 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.”
― Sigmund Freud
199. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
200. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud
201. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
202. “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
― Sigmund Freud
203. “The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
204. “He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
205. “Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
206. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
― Sigmund Freud
207. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
208. “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
― Sigmund Freud
209. “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”
― Sigmund Freud
210. “The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
― Sigmund Freud
211. “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
― Sigmund Freud
212. “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― Sigmund Freud
213. “The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”
― Sigmund Freud
214. “Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”
― Sigmund Freud
215. “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
― Sigmund Freud
216. “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
217. “The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
― Sigmund Freud
218. “Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud
219. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
220. “Where id is, there shall ego be”
― Sigmund Freud
221. “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”
― Sigmund Freud
222. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
223. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved”
― Sigmund Freud
224. “we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…, from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men… This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)”
― Sigmund Freud
225. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”
― Sigmund Freud
226. “The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud
227. “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
― Sigmund Freud
228. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
229. “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
― Sigmund Freud
230. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
231. “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
― Sigmund Freud
232. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
― Sigmund Freud
233.“There are no mistakes”
― Sigmund Freud
234. “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”
― Sigmund Freud
235. “public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.”
― Sigmund Freud
236. “Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”
― Sigmund Freud
237. “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
― Sigmund Freud
238. “Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.”
― Sigmund Freud
239. “The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.”
― Sigmund Freud
240. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
241. “I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”
― Sigmund Freud
242. “You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”
― Sigmund Freud
243. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
244. “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
245. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”
― Sigmund Freud
246. “Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
247. “Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”
― Sigmund Freud
248. “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
― Sigmund Freud
249. “Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss”
― Sigmund Freud
250. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
251. “What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.”
― Sigmund Freud
252. “A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
― Sigmund Freud
253. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
254. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. — A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.”
― Sigmund Freud
255. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
― Sigmund Freud
256. “One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”
― Sigmund Freud
257. “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
― Sigmund Freud
258. “Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
― Sigmund Freud
259. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
― Sigmund Freud
260. “We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.”
― Sigmund Freud
261. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
262. “Anatomy is destiny.”
― Sigmund Freud
263. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
264. “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love”
― Sigmund Freud
265. “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct….”
― Sigmund Freud
266. “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”
― Sigmund Freud
267. “Everyone owes nature a death.”
― Sigmund Freud
268. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.”
― Sigmund Freud
269. “He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.”
― Sigmund Freud
270. “I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member”
― Sigmund Freud
271. “And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
272.“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.”
― Sigmund Freud
273. “Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.”
― Sigmund Freud
274. “dream is the dreamer’s own psychical act.”
― Sigmund Freud
275. “The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.”
― Sigmund Freud
276. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
277. “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.”
― Sigmund Freud
278. “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 its environment (outer world).”
― Sigmund Freud
279. “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
280. “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”
― Sigmund Freud
281. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”
― Sigmund Freud,
282. “I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud
283. “We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”
― Sigmund Freud
284. “In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.”
― Sigmund Freud
285. “The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.”
― Sigmund Freud
286. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
287. “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
288. “If children could, if adults knew.”
― Sigmund Freud
289. “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.”
― Sigmund Freud
290. “Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
291. “Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.”
― Sigmund Freud
292. “We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies . But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.”
― Sigmund Freud
293. “Places are often treated like persons.”
― Sigmund Freud
294. “Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.”
― Sigmund Freud
295. “In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud
296. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
297. “I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.”
― Sigmund Freud
298. “The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian–an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own …. The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.”
― Sigmund Freud
299. “The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.”
― Sigmund Freud
300. “If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their to power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.”
― Sigmund Freud
301. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
302. “All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur.”
― Sigmund Freud
303. “And, finally, groups have never thirsted after
truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence
over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced
by what is untrue as by what is true. They
have an evident tendency not to distinguish between
the two.”
― Sigmund Freud
304. “The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.”
― Sigmund Freud
305. “For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art.”
― Sigmund Freud
306. “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”
― Sigmund Freud
307. “It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud
308. “In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.”
― Sigmund Freud
309. “Dream’s evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.”
― Sigmund Freud
310. “Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.”
― Sigmund Freud
311. “Dreams are never concerned with trivia.”
― Sigmund Freud
312. “It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.”
― Sigmund Freud
313. “Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.”
― Sigmund Freud
314. “The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.”
― Sigmund Freud
315. “We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.”
― Sigmund Freud
316. “Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.”
― Sigmund Freud
317. “Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.”
― Sigmund Freud
318. “The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream ‘No’ does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.”
― Sigmund Freud
319. “Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
― Sigmund Freud
320. “Here is yet another important consideration for
helping us to understand the individual in a group:
Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of
an organised group, a man descends several rungs
in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a
cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—
that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses
the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also
the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.
He then dwells especially upon the lowering in
intellectual ability which an individual experiences when
he becomes merged in a group.”
― Sigmund Freud
321. “I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.”
― Sigmund Freud
322. “Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.”
― Sigmund Freud
323. “Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.”
― Sigmund Freud
324. “If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.”
― Sigmund Freud
325. “The sheer size too, the excessive abundance, scale, and exaggeration of dreams could be an infantile characteristic. The most ardent wish of children is to grow up and get as big a share of everything as the grown-ups; they are hard to satisfy; do not know the meaning of ‘enough.”
― Sigmund Freud
326. “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. [speaking about the Irish]”
― Sigmund Freud
327. “Who lacks sex speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money – about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality”
― Sigmund Freud
328. “Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.”
Sigmund Freud wrote to Albert Einstein”
― Sigmund Freud
329. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
330. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
331. “Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life — it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.”
― Sigmund Freud
332. “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.”
― Sigmund Freud
333. “The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments.”
― Sigmund Freud
334. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
335. “Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.”
― Sigmund Freud
336. “Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.”
― Sigmund Freud
337. “With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair;”
― Sigmund Freud
338. “We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.”
― Sigmund Freud
339. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― Sigmund Freud
340. “Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in the new way an assured pleasure coming later. But the end psychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is mirrored in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in a future life for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly lusts is nothing but a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. In logical pursuit of this prototype, religions have been able to effect the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future life; they have not, however, achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle this way. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in this conquest; science, however, also offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain at the end.”
― Sigmund Freud
341. “…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.”
― Sigmund Freud
342. “We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.”
― Sigmund Freud
343. “With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”
― Sigmund Freud
344. “That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood – the time when he was his own ideal.”
― Sigmund Freud
345. “By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.”
― Sigmund Freud
346. “An inability to meet the real demands of love is one of the essential characteristics of neurosis; the patients are dominated by the opposition of reality and fantasy. They will flee from what they long for most intensely in their fantasies if they encounter it in real life, and they are most likely to abandon themselves to fantasies when they no longer need to fear their realization.”
― Sigmund Freud
347. “One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.”
― Sigmund Freud
348. “The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other form but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is even more humiliating to discover what a large number of those alive today, who must see that this religion is not tenable, yet try to defend it inch by inch, as if with a series of pitiable rearguard actions.”
― Sigmund Freud
349. “It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved.”
― Sigmund Freud
350. “Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.”
― Sigmund Freud
351. “The compulsion which thereby finds expression is in no way different from the repetition-compulsion of neurotics, even though such persons have never shown signs of a neurotic conflict resulting in symptoms. Thus one knows people with whom every human relationship ends in the same way: benefactors whose protégés, however different they may otherwise have been, invariably after a time desert them in ill-will, so that they are apparently condemned to drain to the dregs all the bitterness of ingratitude; men with whom every friendship ends in the friend‘s treachery; others who indefinitely often in their lives invest some other person with authority either in their own eyes or generally, and themselves overthrow such authority after a given time, only to replace it by a new one; lovers whose tender relationships with women each and all run through the same phases and come to the same end, and so on. We are less astonished at this ‗endless repetition of the same‘ if there is involved a question of active behaviour on the part of the person concerned, and if we detect in his character an unalterable trait which must always manifest itself in the repetition of identical experiences.”
― Sigmund Frequd
352. “birini işaret ederek suçlarken işaret parmağınız onu, diğer üç parmağınız ise sizi gösterir.”
― Sigmund Freud
353. “Ben’in işlevsel önemi, devinim üzerindeki kontrolün normal olarak onun payına düşmesinde ifadesini bulur. Ben’in, O ile ilişkisi atın coşkun gücünü dizginlemesi gereken binici gibidir, bir farkla; binici bunu kendi gücüyle yapmayı denerken, Ben ödünç aldığı güçlerle yapmaya çalışır. Bu benzetme bizi biraz daha ileriye götürür. Tıpkı attan düşmek istemediği için başka çaresi kalmayan ve atın onu kendi istediği yere götürmesine rıza gösteren binici gibi, Ben de O’nun isteklerini, kendi istekleriymiş gibi eyleme geçirmeye çalışır.”
― Sigmund Freud
354. “[T]he intense cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a cathexis which steadily mounts up because it cannot be appeased) creates the same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated on the injured part of the body. […] The transition from physical pain to mental pain corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to object cathexis. An object-presentation which is highly cathected by instinctual need plays the same role as a part of the body which is cathected by an increase of stimulus. The continuous nature of the cathectic process and the impossibility of inhibiting it produce the same state of mental helplessness.”
― Sigmund Freud
355. “Ben her şeyden önce bedenseldir, sadece yüzeyden oluşan bir varlık değil aynı zamanda bir yüzeyin yansımasıdır.”
― Sigmund Freud
356. “The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various factors. The most important of these is whether there has been an energetic reaction to the event that provokes the affect. By ‘reaction’ we here understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes – from tears to acts of revenge – in which, as experience shows us, the affects are discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of the affect disappears as a result.”
― Sigmund Freud
357. “Ben’de yalnızca en derin olanlar değil en yüce olanlar da bilinçsiz kalabilir demek zorundayız. Böylelikle, en başta bilinçli Ben hakkında söylediğimiz şey; onun her şeyden önce bir Beden-Ben’i olduğu bilgisi, bize sergileniyormuş gibidir.”
― Sigmund Freud
358. “The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction – as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone to begin with.”
― Sigmund Freud
359. “Bazen bir puro, sadece bir purodur.”
― Sigmund Freud
360. “Vicdanın talepleriyle Ben’in yetenekleri arasındaki gerilim, ‘suçluluk duygusu’ olarak algılanır. Toplumsal duygular da, diğer duygularla özdeş biçimde Ben-ülküsü temeline dayanırlar.”
― Sigmund Freud
361. “The stronger the constitutional factor, the more readily will a trauma lead to a fixation and leave behind a developmental disturbance; the stronger the trauma, the more certainly will its injurious effects become manifest even when the instinctual situation is normal.”
― Sigmund Freud
362. “If anxiety is a reaction of the ego to danger, we shall be tempted to regard the traumatic neuroses, which so often follow upon a narrow escape from death, as a direct result of a fear of death (or fear for life) and to dismiss from our minds the question of castration and the dependent relationships of the ego. […] In view of all that we know about the structure of the comparatively simple neuroses of everyday life, it would seem highly improbable that a neurosis could come into being merely because of the objective presence of danger, without any participation of the deeper levels of the mental apparatus. But the unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any content to our concept of the annihilation of life.”
393. “Ben ile O arasındaki ayrım da çok katı olarak ele alınmamalı; unutmayalım ki Ben, O’nun özel bir biçimde ayrımlaşmış bir kısmıdır.”
― Sigmund Freud
394. “Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.”
― Sigmund Freud
395. “Gözlerinizi içeriye doğru çevirin, kendi derinliklerinize bakın, ilk önce kendinizi tanıyın! O zaman neden hastalanmaya mecbur olduğunuzu anlayacaksınız; ve belki de gelecekte hastalanmanızı önleyeceksiniz.
― Sigmund Freud
396. “Biyoloji tarafından destekelnen kuramsal kabuller temelinde, organik hayatı cansız duruma geri döndürme görevi verilen bir ‘ölüm güdüsü’ varsayımı ileri sürmüştük, öte yandan Eros; hayatı, parçacıklara bölünmüş canlı maddeyi karmaşıklaştırmak ve durmaksızın bir araya getirmek, bu arada, tabii ki onu korumak hedefine yönelir. Her iki güdü de yaşamın ortaya çıkmasıyla bozulmuş bir durumun yeniden oluşturulmasına çalışırken, kelimenin en dar anlamıyla tutucu davranırlar. O halde yaşamın ortaya çıkışı, yaşamayı sürdürmenin ve aynı zamanda ölüme yönelen çabanın sebebi olmaktaydı; yaşamın kendisi de bu iki çaba arasındaki mücadele ve uzlaşma idi. Böylece yaşamın kökenine ilişkin soru kozmolojik bir soru olarak kalırken, hayatın hedefi ve amacı sorunu ikili bir şekilde yanıtlanmış oluyor.”
― Sigmund Freud
397. “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
398. “Ancak klinik gözlemler bize nefretin sadece beklenmedik sıklıkta sevginin yoldaşı olduğunu, insan ilişkilerinde sevginin bir öncülü olduğunu söylemekle kalmıyor, kimi durumlarda nefretin sevgiye ve sevginin de nefrete dönüşebildiğini gösteriyor. Şayet bu dönüşüm sadece zamana bağlı ardıl bir yer-değiştirmeden ibaret değilse, birbirine ters yönlerde seyreden fizyolojik süreçleri öngören, erotik güdülerle ölüm güdüleri arasındaki o temel ayrımın dayandığı zemin kaymış olur.”
― Sigmund Freud
399. “In addition, it must be remembered that in the experiences which lead to a traumatic neurosis the protective shield against external stimuli is broken through and excessive amounts of excitation impinge upon the mental apparatus; so that we have here a second possibility—that anxiety is not only being signalled as an affect but is also being freshly created out of the economic conditions of the situation.
The statement I have just made, to the effect that the ego has been prepared to expect castration by having undergone constantly repeated object-losses, places the question of anxiety in a new light. We have hitherto regarded it as an affective signal of danger; but now, since the danger is so often one of castration, it appears to us as a reaction to a loss, a separation.”
― Sigmund Freud
400. “No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.”
― Sigmund Freud
401. “Another friend of mine, whose insatiable scientific curiosity has impelled him to the most out-of-the-way researches and to the acquisition of encyclopaedic knowledge, has assured me that the Yogi by their practices of withdrawal from the world, concentrating attention on bodily functions, peculiar methods of breathing, actually are able to produce new sensations and diffused feelings in themselves which he regards as regressions to primordial, deeply buried mental states.”
― Sigmund Freud
402. “Düşmanlığın hiçbir doyum ihtimali yoktur, bu yüzden – yani ekonomik nedenlerden ötürü – daha fazla doyum, yani boşalım olanağı sunan sevgi yaklaşımıyla yer değiştirir.”
― Sigmund Freud
403. “Normal, bilinçli suçluluk duygusunun (vicdan) yorumunda herhangi bir zorluk yoktur. Ben ile Ben ülküsü arasındaki gerilime dayanır, Ben’in kendi eleştirel yanınca yargılanışının ifadesidir.”
― Sigmund Freud
404. “In studying the phenomena which testify to the activity of the destructive instinct, we are not confined to observations on pathological material. Numerous facts of normal mental life call for an explanation of this kind, and the sharper our eye grows, the more copiously they strike us.”
― Sigmund Freud
405. “Happiness is a child’s dream fulfilled in maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud
406. “[T]he theory of Empedocles which especially deserves our interest is one which approximates so closely to the psychoanalytic theory of the instincts that we should be tempted to maintain that the two are identical, if it were not for the difference that the Greek philosopher’s theory is a cosmic phantasy while ours is content to claim biological validity.”
― Sigmund Freud
407. “…la civilización todavía no ha sido capaz de difundirse en las almas de la mayoría de los hombres sin una acumulación explosiva de energías destructoras.”
― Sigmund Freud
408. “Eros und Ananke sind auch die Eltern der menschlichen Kultur geworden.”
― Sigmund Freud
409. “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,as in what direction we are moving.To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the windand sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor”
― Sigmund Freud
410. “Gustavo Solivellas dice: “La humanidad progresa. La gente hoy solamente quema mis libros; siglos atrás me hubieran quemado a mí” (Sigmund Freud)”
― Sigmund Freud
411. “Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.”
― Sigmund Freud
412. “Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muß man erhinken.
. . . . . .
Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Sünde zu hinken.”
― Sigmund Freud
413. “filozofların tanıdığı ruhsal,psikanalizin tanıdığı ruhsaldan ayrı bir şeydi.filozofların büyük çoğunluğu salt bilinçli olaylara ruhsal adını vermekteydi.bilinçli dünyayla ruhsalın kapsamı birbiriyle çakışmaktaydı filozoflara göre….filozoflara göre ruhun bilinçli fenomenlerden başka bir içeriği yoktu.”
― Sigmund Freud
414. “Schubert, for instance, claims: “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
― Sigmund Freud
415. “The chief task during the latency period seems to be the fending-off of the temptation to masturbate. This struggle produces a series of symptoms which appear in a typical fashion in the most different individuals and which in general have the character of a ceremonial. It is a great pity that no one has as yet collected them and systematically analysed them.”
― Sigmund Freud
416. “It is therefore reasonable to expect of an analyst, as a part of his qualifications, a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness. In addition, he must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher. And finally we must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth — that is, on a recognition of reality — and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit.”
― Sigmund Freud
417. “Students of human nature and philosophers have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an independent force and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life. According to their view our intellect can work reliably only when it is removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise it acts simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will and delivers the results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless where our interests are concerned. Whenever possible psychoanalytic experience has driven home this assertion. It is in a position to prove every day that the cleverest people suddenly behave as unintelligently as defectives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance, but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance has been overcome.”
― Sigmund Freud
418. “Siempre se podrá vincular amorosamente entre sí a mayor número de hombres, con la condición de que sobren otros en quienes descargar los golpes.”
― Sigmund Freud
419. “y si no estuviese habituado a designar a tales personas con el nombre de neuróticos obsesivos hallaría muy adecuado el nombre de enfermedad del tabú para caracterizar sus estados.”
― Sigmund Freud
420. “But besides having this special feature which is difficult to isolate, we notice that anxiety is accompanied by fairly definite physical sensations which can be referred to particular organs of the body. […] The clearest and most frequent ones are those connected with the respiratory organs and with the heart. They provide evidence that motor innervations—that is, processes of discharge—play a part in the general phenomenon of anxiety.”
― Sigmund Freud
421. “1o La falta de motivación de las prescripciones; 2o Su imposición por una necesidad interna; 3o Su facultad de desplazamiento y contagio, y 4o La causación de actos ceremoniales y de prescripciones, emanados de las prohibiciones mismas.”
― Sigmund Freud
422. “It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.”
― Sigmund Freud
423. “bisogna svelarsi come il solo malvagio fra tutte le nobili persone con le quali si spartisce la vita”
― Sigmund Freud
424. “Let us leave the heavens to the angels and the sparrows.”
― Sigmund Freud
425. “We assume, in other words, that an anxiety-state is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character. In man, birth provides a prototypic experience of this kind, and we are therefore inclined to regard anxiety-states as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.”
― Sigmund Freud
426. “Barátom így szólt hozzám akkor az Andrássy-úton: Semmi emberi nem idegen tőlem, mire én – pszichoanalitikus tapasztalatokra célozva – megjegyeztem: Messzebb is mehetnél ennél, és beismerhetnéd, hogy semmi állati nem idegen tőled.”
― Sigmund Freud
427. “We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word ‘happiness’ only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.”
― Sigmund Freud
428. “Voluntary loneliness, isolation from others, is the readiest safeguard against the unhappiness that may arise out of human relations. We know what this means: the happiness found along this path is that of peace. Against the dreaded outer world one can defend oneself only by turning away in some other direction, if the difficulty is to be solved single-handed. There is indeed another and better way: that of combining with the rest of the human community and taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science.”
― Sigmund Freud
429. “prohibición, porque sin ella hubiera penetrado la”
― Sigmund Freud
430. “Just as the ego controls the path to action in regard to the external world, so it controls access to consciousness.”
― Sigmund Freud
431. “Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic ‘normality’, nor yet to demand that the person who has been ‘thoroughly analysed’ shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task”
― Sigmund Freud
432. “We have decided to consider pleasure and ‘pain’ in relation to the quantity of excitation present in the psychic life—and not confined in any way—along such lines that ‘pain’ corresponds with an increase and pleasure with a decrease in this quantity.”
― Sigmund Freud
433. “In my opinion the other affects are also reproductions of very early, perhaps even pre-individual, experiences of vital importance; and I should be inclined to regard them as universal, typical and innate hysterical attacks, as compared to the recently and individually acquired attacks which occur in hysterical neuroses and whose origin and significance as mnemic symbols have been revealed by analysis.”
― Sigmund Freud
434. “Implacable, though not always on that account successful, severity is shown in condemning the temptation to continue early infantile masturbation, which now attaches itself to regressive (sadistic-anal) ideas but which nevertheless represents the unsubjugated part of the phallic organization.”
― Sigmund Freud
435. “In order to understand a hysterical attack, all one has to do is to look for the situation in which the movements in question formed part of an appropriate and expedient action.”
― Sigmund Freud
436. “Many writers have laid much stress on the weakness of the ego in relation to the id and of our rational elements in the face of the daemonic forces within us; and they display a strong tendency to make what I have said into a corner-stone of a psycho-analytic Weltanschauung. Yet surely the psycho-analyst, with his knowledge of the way in which repression works, should, of all people, be restrained from adopting such an extreme and one-sided view.”
― Sigmund Freud
437. “pleasure or “pain” may be thought of in psycho-physical relationship to conditions of stability and instability,”
― Sigmund Freud
438. “I must confess that I am not at all partial to the fabrication of Weltanschauungen. Such activities may be left to philosophers, who avowedly find it impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker of that kind to give them information on every subject. Let us humbly accept the contempt with which they look down on us from the vantage-ground of their superior needs. But since we cannot forgo our narcissistic pride either, we will draw comfort from the reflection that such ‘Handbooks to Life’ soon grow out of date and that it is precisely our short-sighted, narrow and finicky work which obliges them to appear in new editions, and that even the most up-to-date of them are nothing but attempts to find a substitute for the ancient, useful and all-sufficient Church Catechism. We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose.”
― Sigmund Freud
439. “Όταν η παραβίαση ενός ταμπού δεν έχει σαν συνέπεια την τιμωρία του ένοχου, οι πρωτόγονοι βλέπουν να ξυπνά μέσα τους ομαδικά η απειλή κάποιου κινδύνου και τότε εφαρμόζουν οι ίδιοι την τιμωρία. Ο μηχανισμός αυτής της αλληλεγγύης εξηγείται με το με το φόβο του μεταδοτικού παραδείγματος, της παρακίνησης στη μίμιση και της μολυσματικής φύσης του ταμπού. Όταν κάποιος κατόρθωσε να ικανοποιήσει έναν απωθημένο ποθο, τα άλλα μέλη της ομάδας νιώθουν τον πειρασμό να κάνουν το ίδιο και για να τον καταστειλουν τιμωρούν αυτόν που έχει νοιώσει αυτήν την ικανοποίηση και τον φθονούν. Κι έτσι, με το πρόσχημα της εξιλέωσης, έχουν την ευκαιρία να διαπράξουν κι αυτοί την ίδια ανόσια πράξη. Αυτή η βασική αρχή του ανθρώπινου ποινικού συστήματος, απορρέει από τους απωθημένους πόθους κι απ’την εκδίκηση στ’ όνομα μιας κοινωνίας που έχει προσβληθεί.”
― Sigmund Freud
440. “Die Strenge der ethischen Forderungen würde nicht viel schaden, wenn die Erziehung sagte: So sollten die Menschen sein, um glücklich zu werden und andere glücklich zu machen; aber man muß damit rechnen, daß sie nicht so sind. Anstatt dessen läßt man den Jugendlichen glauben, daß alle anderen die ethischen Vorschriften erfüllen, also tugendhaft sind. Damit begründet man die Forderung, daß er auch so werde.”
― Sigmund Freud
441. “We once more find here an illustration of the truth that every exaggeration contains the seed of its own undoing.”
― Sigmund Freud
442. “[A]s we know, the sexual development in childhood determines what direction this new start at puberty will take. Not only will the early aggressive impulses be re-awakened; but a greater or lesser proportion of the new libidinal impulses—in bad cases the whole of them—will have to follow the course prescribed for them by regression and will emerge as aggressive and destructive tendencies. In consequence of the erotic trends being disguised in this way and owing to the powerful reaction-formations in the ego, the struggle against sexuality will henceforward be carried on under the banner of ethical principles.”
― Sigmund Freud
443. “What else does psychoanalysis do here but confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really do?”
― Sigmund Freud
444. “Another method of guarding against pain is by using the libido-displacements that our mental equipment allows off, by which it gains so greatly in flexibility. The task is then one of transferring the instinctual aims into such directions that they cannot be frustrated by the outer world. Sublimation of the instincts lends an aid in this. Its success is greatest when a man knows how to heighten sufficiently his capacity for obtaining pleasure from mental and intellectual work. Fate has little power against him then.”
― Sigmund Freud
445. “Haffner32 (p. 19): “First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day.”
― Sigmund Freud
446. “The situation, then, which it regards as a ‘danger’ and against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless. I think that if we adopt this view all the facts fall into place. The situation of non-satisfaction in which the amounts of stimulation rise to an unpleasurable height without its being possible for them to be mastered psychically or discharged must for the infant be analogous to the experience of being born—must be a repetition of the situation of danger. What both situations have in common is the economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the ‘danger’.”
― Sigmund Freud
447. “It shows that the idea of being devoured by the father gives expression, in a form that has undergone regressive degradation, to a passive, tender impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense.”
― Sigmund Freud
448. “Is it, moreover, a question merely of the replacement of the [psychical] representative by a regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id? It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the Russian ‘Wolf Man’ gives very definite support to the second, more serious, view …”
― Sigmund Freud
449. “Em que consiste o trabalho realizado pelo luto? Não me parece descabido expor esse trabalho da forma seguinte. O exame da realidade mostrou que o objeto amado não mais existe, e então exige que toda a libido seja retirada de suas conexões com esse objeto. Isso desperta uma compreensível oposição – observa-se geralmente que o ser humano não gosta de abandonar uma posição libidinal, mesmo quando um substituto já se anuncia. Essa posição pode ser tão intensa que se produz um afastamento da realidade e um apego ao objeto mediante uma psicose de desejo alucinatório. O normal é que vença o respeito à realidade. Mas a solicitação desta não pode ser atendida imediatamente. É cumprida aos poucos, com grande aplicação de tempo e energia de investimento, e enquanto isso a existência do objeto perdido se prolonga na psique. Cada uma das lembranças e expectativa em que a libido se achava ligada ao objeto é enfocada e superinvestida, e em cada uma sucede o desligamento da libido. Não é fácil fundamentar economicamente porque é tão dolorosa essa operação de compromisso em que o mandamento da realidade pouco a pouco se efetiva. É curioso que esse doloroso desprazer nos pareça natural. Mas o fato é que após a consumação do trabalho do luto, o Eu fica novamente livre e desimpedido” (FREUD, Sigmundo. Luto e Melancolia, In _____. Introdução ao Narcisismo, Ensaios de metapsicologia e outros ensaios [1914-1916]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010. (vol. 12). p. 173.”
― Sigmund Freud
450. “We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things.”
― Sigmund Freud
451. “At any rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.”
― Sigmund Freud
452. “Schuldgefühle, … sind die fundamentalen Kräfte, die Großzügigkeit und Altruismus zugrundeliegen.”
― Sigmund Freud
453.“The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex—both his hostile and his tender impulses towards his father and his tender impulses towards his mother.”
― Sigmund Freud
454. “But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration.”
― Sigmbund Freud
455. “Quando uma solteirona solitária transfere sua afeição para animais, ou um solteirão se torna um entusiástico colecionador, quando um soldado defende um farrapo de pano colorido – uma bandeira – com o sangue de sua vida, quando a pressão extra de um aperto de mão significa bem-aventurança para aquele que ama, ou quando, em Otelo, um lenço perdido precipita uma explosão de cólera – tudo isso constitui exemplos de deslocamentos psíquicos, aos quais não levantamos nenhuma objeção. Mas, quando ouvimos que uma decisão quanto ao que alcançará nossa consciência e o que será mantido fora dela – o que pensaremos, em suma – tenha sido alcançada da mesma forma e sobre os mesmos princípios, temos a impressão de um fato patológico e, se tais coisas ocorrerem na vida de vigília, nós a descreveremos como erro de pensamento.”
― Sigmund Freud
456. “It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.”
― Sigmund Freud
457. “Castration anxiety develops into moral anxiety — social anxiety — and it is not so easy now to know what the anxiety is about. The formula, ‘separation and expulsion from the horde’, only applies to that later portion of the super-ego which has been formed on the basis of social prototypes, not to the nucleus of the super-ego, which corresponds to the introjected parental agency.”
― Sigmund Freud
458. “el antiguo principio de minima non curat praetor, que entre lo bueno y lo malo existe todo un amplio grupo de cosas pequeñas e indiferentes, de las que nadie debe hacerse un reproche.”
― Sigmund Freud
459. “As far as can be seen at present, the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido. It is always the ego’s attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido.”
― Sigmund Freud
460. “Finalmente, há outro fato que se deve ter em mente como capaz de levar os sonhos a serem esquecidos, a saber, que a maioria das pessoas têm muito pouco interesse pelos seus sonhos. Qualquer um, como um pesquisador científico, que preste atenção aos seus sonhos por certo período de tempo, terá mais sonhos do que habitualmente – o que, sem dúvida, significa que ele se recorda dos seus sonhos com maior facilidade e frequencia.”
― Sigmund Freud
461. “Races are roughly represented by the states they form and these states by the governments which guide them. The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A state at war makes free use of every injustice, every act of violence, that would dishonor the individual. It employs not only permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the enemy, and this to a degree which apparently outdoes what was customary in previous wars. The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy and a censorship of news and expression of opinion which render the minds of those who are thus intellectually repressed defenseless against every unfavorable situation and every wild rumor. It absolves itself from guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, makes unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power, which the individual is then supposed to sanction out of patriotism.”
― Sigmund Freud
462. “At one time I attached some importance to the view that what was used as a discharge of anxiety was the cathexis which had been withdrawn in the process of repression. To-day this seems to me of scarcely any interest. The reason for this is that whereas I formerly believed that anxiety invariably arose automatically by an economic process, my present conception of anxiety as a signal given by the ego in order to affect the pleasure-unpleasure agency does away with the necessity of considering the economic factor.”
― Sigmund Freud
463. “Why do the animals, kin to ourselves, not manifest any such cultural struggle? Oh, we don’t know. Very probably certain of them, bees, ants, termites, had to strive for thousands of centuries before they found the way to those state institutions, that division of functions, those restrictions upon individuals, which we admire them for today.”
― Sigmund Freud
464. “Lo mejor es siempre enemigo de lo bueno”
― Sigmund Freud
465. “un sentimiento sólo puede ser una fuente de energía si a su vez es expresión de una necesidad imperiosa.”
― Sigmund Freud
466. “The symptoms belonging to this neurosis fall, in general, into two groups, each having an opposite trend. They are either prohibitions, precautions and expiations—that is, negative in character—or they are, on the contrary, substitutive satisfactions which often appear in symbolic disguise. The negative, defensive group of symptoms is the older of the two; but as illness is prolonged, the satisfactions, which scoff at all defensive measures, gain the upper hand. The symptom-formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with satisfaction so that what was originally a defensive command or prohibition acquires the significance of a satisfaction as well; and in order to achieve this end it will often make use of the most ingenious associative paths.”
― Sigmund Freud
467. “Si colocamos en un orden arbitrario las palabras de un verso, nos será muy difícil retenerlo así en nuestra memoria. «Bien ordenadas y en sucesión lógica, se ayudan unas palabras a otras, y la totalidad plena de sentido es fácilmente recordada durante largo tiempo. Lo desprovisto de sentido nos es tan difícil de retener como lo confuso o desordenado.»”
― Sigmund Freud
468. “Niemals sind wir ungeschützter gegen das Leiden, als wenn wir Lieben. Niemals hilfloser unglücklich, als wenn wir das geliebte Objekt oder seine Liebe verloren haben.”
― Sigmund Freud
469. “In answering the question as to what provokes the dream, as to the connection of the dream, in the daily troubles, we must say, in terms of the insight given us by replacing the manifest latent dream content: The dream does never trouble itself about things which are not deserving of our concern during the day, and trivialities which do not trouble us during the day have no power to pursue us whilst asleep.”
― Sigmund Freud
470. “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud
471. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud
472. “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud
473. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud
474. “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud
475. “Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud
476. “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
― Sigmund Freud
477. “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud
478. “A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud
479. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
480. “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
481. “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 necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud
482. “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
483. “In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”
― Sigmund Freud
484. “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
― Sigmund Freud
485. “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
― Sigmund Freud
486. “Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud
487. “The madman is a dreamer awake”
― Sigmund Freud
488. “It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant… is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires – or forbidden to him – he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times… Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man’s likeness to a god still more.”
― Sigmund Freud
489. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
― Sigmund Freud
490. “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.”
― Sigmund Freud
491. “Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.”
― Sigmund Freud
492. “Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. 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.”
― Sigmund Freud
493. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
494. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud
495. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
496. “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
― Sigmund Freud
497. “The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
498. “He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
499. “Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
500. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
― Sigmund Freud
501. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
502. “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
― Sigmund Freud
503. “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”
― Sigmund Freud
504. “The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
― Sigmund Freud
505. “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
― Sigmund Freud
506. “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― Sigmund Freud
507. “The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”
― Sigmund Freud
508. “Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”
― Sigmund Freud
509. “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
― Sigmund Freud
510. “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
511. “The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
― Sigmund Freud
512. “Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud
513. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
514. “Where id is, there shall ego be”
― Sigmund Freud
515. “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”
― Sigmund Freud
516. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
517. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved”
― Sigmund Freud
518. “we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…, from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men… This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)”
― Sigmund Freud
519. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”
― Sigmund Freud
520. “The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud
521. “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
― Sigmund Freud
522. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
523. “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
― Sigmund Freud
524. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
525. “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
― Sigmund Freud
526. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
― Sigmund Freud
527. “There are no mistakes”
― Sigmund Freud
528. “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”
― Sigmund Freud
529. “public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.”
― Sigmund Freud
530. “Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”
― Sigmund Freud
531. “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
― Sigmund Freud
532. “Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.”
― Sigmund Freud
533. “The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.”
― Sigmund Freud
534. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
535. “I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”
― Sigmund Freud
536. “You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”
― Sigmund Freud
537. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
538. “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
539. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”
― Sigmund Freud
540. “Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
541. “Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”
― Sigmund Freud
542. “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
― Sigmund Freud
543. “Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss”
― Sigmund Freud
544. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
545. “What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.”
― Sigmund Freud
546. “A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
― Sigmund Freud
547. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
548. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. — A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.”
― Sigmund Freud
549. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
― Sigmund Freud
550. “One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”
― Sigmund Freud
551. “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
― Sigmund Freud
552. “Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
― Sigmund Freud
553. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
― Sigmund Freud
554. “We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.”
― Sigmund Freud
555. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
556. “Anatomy is destiny.”
― Sigmund Freud
557. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
558. “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love”
― Sigmund Freud
559. “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct….”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
560. “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”
― Sigmund Freud
561. “Everyone owes nature a death.”
― Sigmund Freud
562. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.”
― Sigmund Freud
563. “He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.”
― Sigmund Freud
564. “I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member”
― Sigmund Freud
565. “And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
566. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
567. “Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.”
― Sigmund Freud
568. “dream is the dreamer’s own psychical act.”
― Sigmund Freud
569. “The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.”
― Sigmund Freud
570. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.”
- ― Sigmund Freud
- “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 its environment (outer world).”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
- “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”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “If children could, if adults knew.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies . But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Places are often treated like persons.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian–an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own …. The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their to power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “And, finally, groups have never thirsted after
truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence
over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced
by what is untrue as by what is true. They
have an evident tendency not to distinguish between
the two.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art.”
― Sigmund Freud,
- “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Dream’s evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.”
― Sigmund Freud
- “Dreams are never concerned with trivia.”
― Sigmund Freud
