Sigmund Freud's Quotes

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

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.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

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.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

One is very crazy when in love.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

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.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

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.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought 'Husbands and Wives' was great.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.