Sigmund Freud Quotes

Psychoanalysis ... should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual.

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.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

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

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

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.

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.

There are no mistakes

The common characteristic of all perversions, on the other hand, is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal. And so you realize that the turning point in the development of sexual life lies in its subjugation to the purpose of reproduction. Everything this side of the turning point, everything that has given up this purpose and serves the pursuit of pleasure alone, must carry the term "perverse" and as such be regarded with contempt.

Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.

A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.

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

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.

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.

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.