Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.”

— Sigmund Freud

102. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

105. “The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.”

— Sigmund Freud

106. “The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

108. “Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.”

— Sigmund Freud

109. “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”

— Sigmund Freud

110. “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 Freud

111. “In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.”

— Sigmund Freud

112. “Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can’t control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”

— Sigmund Freud

113. “The scope of one’s personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.”

— Sigmund Freud

114. “Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.”

— Sigmund Freud

115. “Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.”

— Sigmund Freud

116. “Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.”

— Sigmund Freud

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

120. “The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

122. “Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

127. “Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.”

— Sigmund Freud

128. “If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?”

— Sigmund Freud

129. “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.”

— Sigmund Freud

130. “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

— Sigmund Freud

131. “We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.”

— Sigmund Freud

132. “I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash...”

— Sigmund Freud

133. “The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.”

— Sigmund Freud

134. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

— Sigmund Freud

135. “The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian – an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

137. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces.”

— Sigmund Freud

138. “Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.”

— Sigmund Freud

139. “It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

141. “Let us consider the polarity of love and hate... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.”

— Sigmund Freud

142. “Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.”

— Sigmund Freud

143. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”

— Sigmund Freud

144. “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

146. “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.”

— Sigmund Freud

147. “A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.”

— Sigmund Freud

148. “Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.”

— Sigmund Freud

149. “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.”

— Sigmund Freud

150. “There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.”

— Sigmund Freud