Top 468 Quotes & Sayings by Sigmund Freud - Page 2

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

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

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

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?

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.

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

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.

Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

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.

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.

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

The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.

It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.

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."

Love is a state of temporary psychosis.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

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

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. 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.

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

That which we can't remember, we will repeat.

Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.

The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.

The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

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

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

If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.

To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.

Without love we fall ill.

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.

We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

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

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

One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

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.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.

There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

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

I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.

I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.

Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.