Sigmund Freud Quotes
-
Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
-
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.
-
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
-
Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.
-
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
-
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
-
The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
-
Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
-
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.
-
I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
-
If children could, if adults knew.
-
After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
-
A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
-
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.
-
The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
-
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.
-
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
-
This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
-
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
-
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
-
Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
-
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.
-
Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
-
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.