Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

203. “A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion – in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

206. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

212. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

214. “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

215. “Christmas is the alcoholidays.”

— Sigmund Freud

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

220. “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

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. “Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

225. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

231. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

238. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

240. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

243. “Sexual morality – as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it – is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.”

— Sigmund Freud

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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