Sigmund Freud Quotes

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after
truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence
over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced
by what is untrue as by what is true. They
have an evident tendency not to distinguish between
the two.

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that 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.

Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.

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.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

Dreams are never concerned with trivia.

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.

The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion — the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought — for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.

Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.

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.

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