Sigmund Freud Quotes

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....

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.

dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

ان الذي نظنه لغزاً في الحلم , لابد أن يكون ذكرى واقعية منسية !

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

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.

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.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

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.