Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
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Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
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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.
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
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Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.
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Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
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Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
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We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
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The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.
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If youth knew; if age could.
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Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
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It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
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America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
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A strong egoism is a protection.
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We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
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Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
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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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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.
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Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
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The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
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The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
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In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.