Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
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It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
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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.
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Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
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In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.
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Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
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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.
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Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
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Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
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I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
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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.
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We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
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Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers.
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But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
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Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
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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.
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The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
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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.
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How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
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The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
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When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves...