Quotes By Sigmund Freud

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

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?"

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

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

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

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

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

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

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.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

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.

Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.

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

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

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

Anatomy is destiny.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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.

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

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.

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

One is very crazy when in love.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

If you can't do it, give up!

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.