Sigmund Freud Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
-
When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
-
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
-
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
-
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.
-
If you can't do it, give up!
-
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
-
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
-
It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
-
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
-
[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
-
Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis...
-
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
-
I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.
-
We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
-
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
-
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law.
-
The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage -- in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.
-
A strong egoism is a protection.
-
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
-
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
-
The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.