Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

153. “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

154. “If children could, if adults knew.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

156. “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.”

— Sigmund Freud

157. “That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood – the time when he was his own ideal.”

— Sigmund Freud

158. “Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.”

— Sigmund Freud

159. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

160. “We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.”

— Sigmund Freud

161. “When we share – that is poetry in the prose of life.”

— Sigmund Freud

162. “Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.”

— Sigmund Freud

163. “The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

165. “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

166. “The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.”

— Sigmund Freud

167. “A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”

— Sigmund Freud

168. “Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.”

— Sigmund Freud

169. “The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.”

— Sigmund Freud

170. “We are never so vulnerable as when we love.”

— Sigmund Freud

171. “Everyone owes nature a death.”

— Sigmund Freud

172. “Religion originates in the child’s and young mankind’s fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.”

— Sigmund Freud

173. “The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.”

— Sigmund Freud

174. “America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.”

— Sigmund Freud

175. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

176. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

Featured in: Book Quotes

179. “They love their delusions as they love themselves.”

— Sigmund Freud

180. “We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.”

— Sigmund Freud

181. “With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair;.”

— Sigmund Freud

182. “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

183. “It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.”

— Sigmund Freud

184. “Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.”

— Sigmund Freud

185. “Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”

— Sigmund Freud

186. “We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.”

— Sigmund Freud

187. “None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.”

— Sigmund Freud

188. “The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.”

— Sigmund Freud

189. “The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.”

— Sigmund Freud

190. “At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.”

— Sigmund Freud

191. “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.”

— Sigmund Freud

192. “What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.”

— Sigmund Freud

193. “A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

195. “I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”

— Sigmund Freud

196. “He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”

— Sigmund Freud

197. “I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

199. “The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.”

— Sigmund Freud

200. “Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.”

— Sigmund Freud