Sigmund Freud Quotes

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.

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

This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that

Wer verliebt ist, ist demütig. Wer liebt, hat sozusagen ein Stück seines Narzißmus eingebüßt.

The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girls clitoris.

Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.

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...

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. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.

Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.

Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.

"Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which at the same time preserves something of the dream's former over-valuation. The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychical activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state. 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." Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams have their origin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward manifestations of spiritual powers whose free movements have been hampered during the day ("Dream Phantasies," Scherner, Volkelt). A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements — at any rate, in certain fields ("Memory")."

Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

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.

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.