Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’?”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

453. “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?”

— Sigmund Freud

454. “Most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus and is recognised by it as ’danger.”

— Sigmund Freud

455. “There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man’s aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

457. “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

458. “We are astonished to hear declarations by married women and girls which bear witness to a quite particular attitude to the therapeutic problem: they had always known, they say, that they could only be cured by love.”

— Sigmund Freud

459. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

460. “We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.”

— Sigmund Freud

461. “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

462. “Anatomy is destiny.”

— Sigmund Freud

463. “The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

466. “There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.”

— Sigmund Freud

467. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

468. “Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.”

— Sigmund Freud

469. “Individual liberty is not an asset of civilization.”

— Sigmund Freud

470. “But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.”

— Sigmund Freud

471. “Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.”

— Sigmund Freud

472. “A lady once expressed herself in society – the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: “Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!””

— Sigmund Freud

473. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

474. “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”

— Sigmund Freud

475. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

476. “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

477. “I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador... with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.”

— Sigmund Freud

478. “Most importantly, the very inception of the treatment itself necessarily induces a change in the patient’s conscious attitude to his illness... that he does not listen carefully enough to what he obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse.”

— Sigmund Freud

479. “Various sources force us to assume that the so-called earliest childhood recollections are not true memory traces but later elaborations of the same, elaborations which might have been subjected to the influences of many later psychic forces. Thus, the “childhood reminiscences” of individuals altogether advance to the signification of “concealing memories,” and thereby form a noteworthy analogy to the childhood reminiscences as laid down in the legends and myths of nations.”

— Sigmund Freud

480. “We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo’s deep words recalling Hamlet’s speech “is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience.” Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these “reasons of nature” force themselves into experience.”

— Sigmund Freud

481. “The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, “as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.”

— Sigmund Freud

482. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

483. “And I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy – and if they haven’t died, they are still alive today.”

— Sigmund Freud

484. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”

— Sigmund Freud

485. “A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.”

— Sigmund Freud

486. “The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time, it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expression of opinion, which render the minds of those who are, thus, intellectually repressed, defenseless against every unfavorable situation, and every wild rumor.”

— Sigmund Freud

487. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

488. “One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of ‘happiness’: one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.”

— Sigmund Freud

489. “In this situation, what we call natural ethics has nothing to offer but the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think one is better than others. This is where ethics based on religion enters the scene with its promises of a better life hereafter. I am inclined to think that, for as long as virtue goes unrewarded here below, ethics will preach in vain.”

— Sigmund Freud

490. “As these examples show, Freud’s theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.”

— Sigmund Freud

491. “Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”

— Sigmund Freud

492. “So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.”

— Sigmund Freud

493. “In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

495. “I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day – until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.”

— Sigmund Freud

496. “The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.”

— Sigmund Freud

497. “Every man is a poet at heart.”

— Sigmund Freud

498. “If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness, and it guides – by – precepts – backed by the full force of its authority.”

— Sigmund Freud

499. “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

500. “The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.”

— Sigmund Freud