Sigmund Freud Quotes - Page 4

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Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.

The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.

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

A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

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

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

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

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

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.

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

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

One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.

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

Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.

In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

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

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

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

Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

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

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

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

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

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

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

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

I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

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

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

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