Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression.”

— Sigmund Freud

302. “Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.”

— Sigmund Freud

303. “To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.”

— Sigmund Freud

304. “We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream.”

— Sigmund Freud

305. “Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.”

— Sigmund Freud

306. “In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.”

— Sigmund Freud

307. “The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.”

— Sigmund Freud

308. “The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.”

— Sigmund Freud

309. “We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals.”

— Sigmund Freud

310. “Least of all should the artist be held responsible for the fate which befalls his works.”

— Sigmund Freud

311. “Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”

— Sigmund Freud

312. “We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.”

— Sigmund Freud

313. “The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.”

— Sigmund Freud

314. “We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.”

— Sigmund Freud

315. “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.”

— Sigmund Freud

316. “Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.”

— Sigmund Freud

317. “What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”

— Sigmund Freud

318. “A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been resolved and the spell broken.”

— Sigmund Freud

319. “You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”

— Sigmund Freud

320. “Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.”

— Sigmund Freud

321. “If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance.”

— Sigmund Freud

322. “In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.”

— Sigmund Freud

323. “Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.”

— Sigmund Freud

324. “But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.”

— Sigmund Freud

325. “It may be said that hysteria is as ignorant of the science of the structure of the nervous system as we ourselves before we have learnt it.”

— Sigmund Freud

326. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”

— Sigmund Freud

327. “It almost looks like analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.”

— Sigmund Freud

328. “The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.”

— Sigmund Freud

329. “Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.”

— Sigmund Freud

330. “Now it is nothing but torture.”

— Sigmund Freud

331. “Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.”

— Sigmund Freud

332. “The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that’s when they are really making some progress.”

— Sigmund Freud

333. “Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.”

— Sigmund Freud

334. “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”

— Sigmund Freud

335. “It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.”

— Sigmund Freud

336. “Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.”

— Sigmund Freud

337. “Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy...”

— Sigmund Freud

338. “I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.”

— Sigmund Freud

339. “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.”

— Sigmund Freud

340. “The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.”

— Sigmund Freud

341. “I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.”

— Sigmund Freud

342. “There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”

— Sigmund Freud

343. “Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, ‘impossible’ – till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of ‘impossibility’.”

— Sigmund Freud

344. “It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too.”

— Sigmund Freud

345. “We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.”

— Sigmund Freud

346. “Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.”

— Sigmund Freud

347. “Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.”

— Sigmund Freud

348. “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.”

— Sigmund Freud

349. “I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion.”

— Sigmund Freud

350. “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.”

— Sigmund Freud