Sigmund Freud quotes
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“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : Sigmund Freud, Ernst L. Freud (1960). “Letters of Sigmund Freud”, p.258, Courier Corporation
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“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?'”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1955).
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“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.
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“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.
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“There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“... every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will ...”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : Sigmund Freud (1975). “Letters of Sigmund Freud”
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“Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
-- Sigmund FreudSource : Sigmund Freud (2016). “Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners (Annotated)”, p.25, Sigmund Freud
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“I think that it is a good plan to bear in mind that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“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.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
“A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.”
-- Sigmund Freud -
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