Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.”

— Sigmund Freud

203. “In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.”

— Sigmund Freud

204. “The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.”

— Sigmund Freud

205. “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

206. “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.”

— Sigmund Freud

207. “The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego.”

— Sigmund Freud

208. “No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.”

— Sigmund Freud

209. “That which we can’t remember, we will repeat.”

— Sigmund Freud

210. “What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.”

— Sigmund Freud

211. “Christmas is the alcoholidays.”

— Sigmund Freud

212. “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

213. “I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

— Sigmund Freud

214. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. – A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.”

— Sigmund Freud

215. “But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.”

— Sigmund Freud

216. “I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

— Sigmund Freud

217. “When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

220. “A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”

— Sigmund Freud

221. “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

223. “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

224. “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.”

— Sigmund Freud

225. “Rather than living our lives, we are ″lived″ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

227. “After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

229. “But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.”

— Sigmund Freud

230. “The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such...”

— Sigmund Freud

231. “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.”

— Sigmund Freud

232. “Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”

— Sigmund Freud

233. “A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.”

— Sigmund Freud

234. “It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.”

— Sigmund Freud

235. “One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.”

— Sigmund Freud

236. “In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?”

— Sigmund Freud

237. “Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.”

— Sigmund Freud

238. “The communal life of human beings had... a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

240. “The little child is above all shameless, and during its early years it evinces definite pleasure in displaying its body and especially its sexual organs. A counterpart to this desire which is to be considered as perverse, the curiosity to see other persons’ genitals, probably appears first in the later years of childhood when the hindrance of the feeling of shame has already reached a certain development.”

— Sigmund Freud

241. “When people criticise me, I know how to defend myself. But I’m powerless in the face of praise.”

— Sigmund Freud

242. “Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.”

— Sigmund Freud

243. “When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.”

— Sigmund Freud

244. “I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

246. “No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.“.”

— Sigmund Freud

247. “Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.”

— Sigmund Freud

248. “The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.”

— Sigmund Freud

249. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”

— Sigmund Freud

250. “An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.”

— Sigmund Freud