Sigmund Freud Quotes
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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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Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
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When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
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Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
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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 affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.
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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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I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
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There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.
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Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.
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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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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.
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A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
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Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
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The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on.... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!
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Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
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History is just new people making old mistakes.
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The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
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This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
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One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
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Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
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Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.
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The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.
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I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.