Sigmund Freud Quotes
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If children could, if adults knew.
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...perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
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Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.
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[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
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I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
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The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
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We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.
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What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences.
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Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
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Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
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The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
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The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
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All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
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In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.
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Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.
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Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
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After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
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Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
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If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?
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When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
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The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
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Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.
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It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
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One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.