Top 50 Sigmund Freud Quotes

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

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

I have found little that is ‘good‘ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father‘s protection.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

If a man has been his mother‘s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

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

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

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.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

If youth knew; if age could.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

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

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

One is very crazy when in love.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

The ego is not master in its own house.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

If you can’t do it, give up!

Anatomy is destiny.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.