Quotes by Sigmund Freud

I suppose that romantic love was invented as a brilliant means of seduction.

No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.

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 in their object-relations.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?

Dreams are the royal road to the unconcious.

What a distressing contrast is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

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

Anatomy is destiny.

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

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.

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge -- a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.

A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

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

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

Sexual morality -- as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it -- is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on.... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.

There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.

All who seek to be nobler than their constitution permits succumb to neurosis; they would have been better in health if they had found it possible to be morally worse.

Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.

The delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.

In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.

But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.

Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion.

Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.

This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.

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

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

Our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.

It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

I like to avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization -- a kind of sublimation, therefore.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

Now it is nothing but torture.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

The scope of one's personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.

You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.

The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

The great question that has never been answered , and which I have not yet been able to answer , despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul , is What does a woman want?

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

The communal life of human beings had ... a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.

When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.

The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings.

My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.

In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.

A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.

Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls was urgently necessary or society was doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.

The whole thing religion is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

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