Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
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The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
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The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
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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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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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I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
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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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All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.
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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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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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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
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Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.
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Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
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Now it is nothing but torture.
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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.
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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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Christmas is the alcoholidays.
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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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What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
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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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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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The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
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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.