Sigmund Freud Quotes
-
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
-
Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-
I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion.
-
Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
-
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.
-
If youth knew; if age could.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
-
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
-
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.
-
A strong egoism is a protection.
-
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
-
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
-
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
-
The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
-
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.
-
My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.