Sigmund Freud Quotes
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The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
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Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
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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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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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Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.
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That which we can't remember, we will repeat.
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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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The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
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He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
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Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
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Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
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Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. -- A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.
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Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
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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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When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.
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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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So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
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It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.
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Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.
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Now it is nothing but torture.
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A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
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Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
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A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness.
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We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.