Quotes by
Sigmund Freud |
1856-1939 , Austrian psychologist, founder of psychoanalysis
Austrian neurologist and psychologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work, its spell remained powerful well after his death.
| 48 quotes | 4,563 visits |
Quotations
| • | Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. 16 |
| • | Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. 13 |
| • | Love is a state of temporary psychosis. 11 |
| • | From error to error one discovers the entire truth. 8 |
| • | The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” 7 |
| • | Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. 7 |
| • | The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions. 6 |
| • | One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. 6 |
| • | In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart. 6 |
| • | The poor ego has a hard time; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the demands of all three…The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id. 6 |
| • | None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality. 6 |
| • | The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God. 6 |
| • | Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. 5 |
| • | Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them. 5 |
| • | Neurosis is the incapacity to tolerate adversity. 5 |
| • | How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved. 4 |
| • | Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. 4 |
| • | The ego is not master in its own house. 4 |
| • | Anatomy is destiny. 4 |
| • | Three of life's most important areas: work, love, and taking responsibility. 4 |
| • | Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. 3 |
| • | Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion. 3 |
| • | America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. 3 |
| • | The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle. This gives rise to the Oedipus complex. 3 |
| • | Where does a thought go when it's forgotten? 3 |
| • | Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism. 3 |
| • | We are what we are because we have been what we have been. 3 |
| • | It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. 3 |
| • | Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. 2 |
| • | The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. 2 |
| • | Basically, God is nothing more than an exalted father. 2 |
| • | We must begin to love in order not to fall ill. 2 |
| • | We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva. 2 |
| • | The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. 2 |
| • | What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. 2 |
| • | Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. 2 |
| • | Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. 2 |
| • | Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor. 2 |
| • | One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be “happy” is not included in the plan of “Creation.” 2 |
| • | 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 necessities. 2 |
| • | Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 2 |
| • | We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. 2 |
| • | Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. 2 |
Personal Stories
| • | A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller’s words, a tyrant... My tyrant is psychology. 2 |
| • | I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador. 2 |
| • | We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us. 2 |
