Top 15 Sigmund Freud Quotes

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

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

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

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

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. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

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.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.