Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.”

— Sigmund Freud

402. “Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.”

— Sigmund Freud

403. “Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires – or forbidden to him – he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself.”

— Sigmund Freud

404. “The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”

— Sigmund Freud

405. “For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is – art.”

— Sigmund Freud

406. “The superego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.”

— Sigmund Freud

407. “The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.”

— Sigmund Freud

408. “I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.”

— Sigmund Freud

409. “Human’s intrinsic nature manifest in it’s misunderstandings.”

— Sigmund Freud

410. “It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.”

— Sigmund Freud

411. “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”

— Sigmund Freud

412. “Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls” was urgently necessary or society was “doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.”

— Sigmund Freud

413. “The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult’s reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge – a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.”

— Sigmund Freud

414. “Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.”

— Sigmund Freud

415. “Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.”

— Sigmund Freud

416. “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.”

— Sigmund Freud

417. “Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.”

— Sigmund Freud

418. “In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

— Sigmund Freud

419. “Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”

— Sigmund Freud

420. “The way in which these factors – displacement, condensation, and over-determination – interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.”

— Sigmund Freud

421. “We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”

— Sigmund Freud

422. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.”

— Sigmund Freud

423. “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”

— Sigmund Freud

424. “In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.”

— Sigmund Freud

425. “In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.”

— Sigmund Freud

426. “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”

— Sigmund Freud

427. “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”

— Sigmund Freud

428. “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.”

— Sigmund Freud

429. “The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.”

— Sigmund Freud

430. “The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.”

— Sigmund Freud

431. “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

— Sigmund Freud

432. “The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.”

— Sigmund Freud

433. “I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.”

— Sigmund Freud

434. “The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

— Sigmund Freud

435. “Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

437. “We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.”

— Sigmund Freud

438. “The first is the Credo quia absurdum of the early Father. It would imply that religious doctrines are outside reason’s jurisdiction; they stand above reason. Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.”

— Sigmund Freud

439. “Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers.”

— Sigmund Freud

440. “We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.”

— Sigmund Freud

441. “The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.”

— Sigmund Freud

442. “The dream shows how recollections of one’s everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended.”

— Sigmund Freud

443. “The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.”

— Sigmund Freud

444. “There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man’s aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.”

— Sigmund Freud

445. “The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.”

— Sigmund Freud

446. “Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?”

— Sigmund Freud

447. “It is plainly the case that children repeat everything in their play that has made a powerful impression on them, and that in so doing they abreact the intensity of the ecperience and make themselves so to speak master of the situation.”

— Sigmund Freud

448. “May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’?”

— Sigmund Freud

449. “I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.”

— Sigmund Freud

450. “Most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus and is recognised by it as ’danger.”

— Sigmund Freud