Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

156. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

163. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

168. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

170. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

173. “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

174. “Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

180. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

182. “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”

— Sigmund Freud

183. “Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.”

— Sigmund Freud

184. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.”

— Sigmund Freud

185. “Everyone owes nature a death.”

— Sigmund Freud

186. “Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”

— Sigmund Freud

187. “The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.”

— Sigmund Freud

188. “Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.”

— Sigmund Freud

189. “Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

191. “The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.”

— Sigmund Freud

192. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”

— Sigmund Freud

193. “A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.”

— Sigmund Freud

194. “Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.”

— Sigmund Freud

195. “Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.”

— Sigmund Freud

196. “Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.”

— Sigmund Freud

197. “I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.”

— Sigmund Freud

198. “I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

200. “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