Top 500 Sigmund Freud Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.”

— Sigmund Freud

402. “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

— Sigmund Freud

403. “I do not in general have the impression that sexual abstinence helps produce energetic, independent men of action or original thinkers, bold liberators and reformers. Far more often it produces well-behaved weaklings who later merge into the great mass of those who habitually, if reluctantly, follow the lead given by strong individuals.”

— Sigmund Freud

404. “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”

— Sigmund Freud

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

410. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

412. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

414. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

426. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.”

— Sigmund Freud

444. “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

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— 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. “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

449. “Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.”

— Sigmund Freud

450. “Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.”

— Sigmund Freud