Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
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Dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
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I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.
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An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
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We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.
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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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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
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The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.
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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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A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
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Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
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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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The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
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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.
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My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
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Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
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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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Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.
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Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.
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It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.
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Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
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The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
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The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
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The goal of all life is death...