Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

54. “History is just new people making old mistakes.”

— Sigmund Freud

55. “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

56. “Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.”

— Sigmund Freud

57. “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

58. “Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”

— Sigmund Freud

59. “The ego is not master in its own house.”

— Sigmund Freud

60. “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

62. “Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.”

— Sigmund Freud

63. “The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.”

— Sigmund Freud

64. “The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.”

— Sigmund Freud

65. “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!”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

68. “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”

— Sigmund Freud

69. “All that matters is love and work.”

— Sigmund Freud

70. “Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense.”

— Sigmund Freud

71. “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”

— Sigmund Freud

72. “Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.”

— Sigmund Freud

73. “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”

— Sigmund Freud

74. “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

75. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

— Sigmund Freud

76. “Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.”

— Sigmund Freud

77. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

— Sigmund Freud

78. “All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.”

— Sigmund Freud

79. “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

80. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

81. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”

— Sigmund Freud

82. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

83. “Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.”

— Sigmund Freud

84. “One is very crazy when in love.”

— Sigmund Freud

85. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

86. “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

87. “Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.”

— Sigmund Freud

88. “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.”

— Sigmund Freud

89. “Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.”

— Sigmund Freud

90. “The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.”

— Sigmund Freud

91. “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?”

— Sigmund Freud

92. “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

93. “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”

— Sigmund Freud

94. “I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.”

— Sigmund Freud

95. “When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.”

— Sigmund Freud

96. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

99. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

100. “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