Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

256. “Where id is, there shall ego be.”

— Sigmund Freud

257. “There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.”

— Sigmund Freud

258. “My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.”

— Sigmund Freud

259. “The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.”

— Sigmund Freud

260. “The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.”

— Sigmund Freud

261. “Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.”

— Sigmund Freud

262. “Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.”

— Sigmund Freud

263. “Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.”

— Sigmund Freud

264. “A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!”

— Sigmund Freud

265. “No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

267. “So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.”

— Sigmund Freud

268. “In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it – the present, that is to say, must have become the past – before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.”

— Sigmund Freud

269. “To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.”

— Sigmund Freud

270. “Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”

— Sigmund Freud

271. “The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.”

— Sigmund Freud

272. “Happiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish.”

— Sigmund Freud

273. “Places are often treated like persons.”

— Sigmund Freud

274. “We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.”

— Sigmund Freud

275. “The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.”

— Sigmund Freud

276. “Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.”

— Sigmund Freud

277. “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”

— Sigmund Freud

278. “Dreams are never concerned with trivia.”

— Sigmund Freud

279. “Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us O’er the world’s tempestuous sea; guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, for we have no help but thee.”

— Sigmund Freud

280. “Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.”

— Sigmund Freud

281. “In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”

— Sigmund Freud

282. “Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.”

— Sigmund Freud

283. “Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.”

— Sigmund Freud

284. “Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.”

— Sigmund Freud

285. “You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.”

— Sigmund Freud

286. “The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.”

— Sigmund Freud

287. “That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. ‘For the little children do not like it’ when there is talk of man’s inborn tendency to ‘wickedness’, to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.”

— Sigmund Freud

288. “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.”

— Sigmund Freud

289. “Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.”

— Sigmund Freud

290. “When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.”

— Sigmund Freud

291. “I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.”

— Sigmund Freud

292. “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.”

— Sigmund Freud

293. “I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.”

— Sigmund Freud

294. “Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

296. “One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.”

— Sigmund Freud

297. “Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life – it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.”

— Sigmund Freud

298. “The communists think they have found the way to redeem mankind from evil. Man is equivocally good and well disposed to his neighbour, but his nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property... I can recognize the psychological presumption behind it as a baseless illusion. With the abolition of private property the human love of aggression is robbed of one of its tools, a strong one no doubt, but certainly not the strongest... Aggression was not created by property.”

— Sigmund Freud

299. “The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation.”

— Sigmund Freud

300. “The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young – a human activity which developed late.”

— Sigmund Freud