Sigmund Freud Quotes

Dreams are never concerned with trivia.

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?

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

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.

Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?

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.

The ego is not master in its own house.

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’.

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.

Die Anatomie ist das Schicksal

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.

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

there is no such thing as an unconscious no.

"يبدو أن الكثير من الناس لا يسهل عليهم السماح لكل أفكارهم التلقائية بالتداعي الحر دون أن يمارسوا عليها نقدا عنيفا.
والإبداع الأدبي خير مثال على تداعي حر للأفكار ، هذا إذا أولينا التصديق للشاعر والفيلسوف العظيم فردريك شيللر، إذ يقول في إحدى رسائله إلى صديق يشكو له من نضب قريحته عن الإبداع: "أعتقد أن السبب في شكواك يرجع إلى استبداد عقلك بخيالك، فإن العقل إذا غالى في إكثاب النظر في الأفكار التي ترد عليه كأنه واقف لها بالمرصاد وهي لا تزال على الأبواب، لم يكن في ذلك نفع بل لعله يعرقل قريحة الإبداع! فالفكرة إن أخذتها على حدة قد تبدو تافهة كل التفاهة، غريبة أقصى الغرابة، ولكن أخرى قد تتلوها فإذا هي ذات شأن، أو هي قد ترتبط بأفكار غيرها تلوح في مثل سخفها فإذا هي الحلقة المفقودة ؛ فما يستطيع العقل أن يحكم على الكل إذا هو لم يمسك الفكرة أمدا كافياً يتأملها مقرونة بأخواتها. وأما القريحة المبدعة - فيما يظهر لي - فمعها على العكس يرفع العقل الحراسة عن الأبواب، تاركاً الأفكار تهجم شذر مذر!
وأما أنتم يا حضرات النقاد فتستحيون هذا الجنون العابر الموقوت الذي يعرفه كل مبدع حقيقي، ومن ثم شكواكم من العقم، فأنتم تنبذون سريعاً، وتفرقون عسفا

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.