Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”

— Sigmund Freud

352. “When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

354. “One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.”

— Sigmund Freud

355. “Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.”

— Sigmund Freud

356. “I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.”

— Sigmund Freud

357. “We may say that the patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it.”

— Sigmund Freud

358. “We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.”

— Sigmund Freud

359. “Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.”

— Sigmund Freud

360. “The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.”

— Sigmund Freud

361. “A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.”

— Sigmund Freud

362. “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”

— Sigmund Freud

363. “Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.”

— Sigmund Freud

364. “I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man’s turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.”

— Sigmund Freud

365. “All that is to live in endless song Must in life-time first be drown’d.”

— Sigmund Freud

366. “The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it... He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”

— Sigmund Freud

367. “The world is no nursery.”

— Sigmund Freud

368. “The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.”

— Sigmund Freud

369. “It often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.”

— Sigmund Freud

370. “An inability to meet the real demands of love is one of the essential characteristics of neurosis; the patients are dominated by the opposition of reality and fantasy. They will flee from what they long for most intensely in their fantasies if they encounter it in real life, and they are most likely to abandon themselves to fantasies when they no longer need to fear their realization.”

— Sigmund Freud

371. “Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus’s misadventure in discovering America.”

— Sigmund Freud

372. “If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into hap-hazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, thought they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental paitents are split and broken structures of this same kind... They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, physical reality...”

— Sigmund Freud

373. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

— Sigmund Freud

374. “In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.”

— Sigmund Freud

375. “The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.”

— Sigmund Freud

376. “How far back into childhood do our memories reach?”

— Sigmund Freud

377. “It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.”

— Sigmund Freud

378. “I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.”

— Sigmund Freud

379. “The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.”

— Sigmund Freud

380. “Woman... what does she want?”

— Sigmund Freud

381. “By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.”

— Sigmund Freud

382. “Everyone of us who can look back over a longer or shorter life experience will probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises if he had found the courage and decision to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he made in his intercourse with people, and to consider them as indications of the intentions which were still being kept secret. As.”

— Sigmund Freud

383. “Opposition is not necessarily enmity.”

— Sigmund Freud

384. “We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.”

— Sigmund Freud

385. “Not that I know so much, but there are so many equally valid possibilities. For the present I do not believe that anyone is justified in saying that sexuality is the mother of all feelings.”

— Sigmund Freud

386. “As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.”

— Sigmund Freud

387. “The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish, which then allowed it, though already properly prepared, to “originate” for consciousness.”

— Sigmund Freud

388. “The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.”

— Sigmund Freud

389. “An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.”

— Sigmund Freud

390. “The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

— Sigmund Freud

391. “The unconscious – that is to say, the ‘repressed’ – offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.”

— Sigmund Freud

392. “Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.”

— Sigmund Freud

393. “A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.”

— Sigmund Freud

394. “If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.”

— Sigmund Freud

395. “The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”

— Sigmund Freud

396. “Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.”

— Sigmund Freud

397. “The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization – a kind of sublimation, therefore.”

— Sigmund Freud

398. “Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.”

— Sigmund Freud

399. “The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.”

— Sigmund Freud

400. “Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.”

— Sigmund Freud