Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
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Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.
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The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
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Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
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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 psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
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The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.
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These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
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We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
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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.
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If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
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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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Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
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Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
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Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
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The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
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There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.
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Time spent with cats is never wasted.
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I like to avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.
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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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The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
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In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.
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The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
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The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.