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.

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

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

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.

The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

"We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders."

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.

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.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.

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