famous quotes by sigmund freud
Famous Quotes by Sigmund Freud
In this Buzzle article, we will provide a comprehensive list of some of the most famous quotes by Sigmund Freud that delve into varied topics of psychology.
"It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too."
Sigmund Freud―the founding father of psychoanalysis, and the propagator of several other theories, has provided a ground-breaking (and sometimes controversial) insight into the psychology of the human mind with his varied theories. While many criticize Freud for these very theories, a majority respect him for revolutionizing the world of psychology.
Some of his most famous theories include the use of free association, the interpretation of dreams that lead to an insight into subconscious human desires, the theory of transference, and his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary force of motivation in human life.
In this following Buzzle article, we will look into some of the most famous quotes by Freud that delve into varied subjects like motivation, dreams, human psychology, personality, and love.
― Sigmund Freud
Quotes on Love
"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."
"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love."
"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism."
"Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within."
"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."
"Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard."
"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."
"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression."
"Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it."
"When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves."
Quotes on Human Personality and Nature
"It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it."
"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
"Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength."
"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."
"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."
"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement―that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."
"He does not believe that does not live according to his belief."
"The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life."
"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?'"
"Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young."
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."
"Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it."
"Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine."
"The first request of civilization ... is that of justice."
"From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."
"The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."
"Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them."
"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."
"We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction."
"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."
"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations."
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
"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."
"Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill."
"We hate the criminal and deal severely with him, because we view in his deeds as in a distorting mirror our own criminal tendencies."
"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror."
"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."
"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past."
"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 there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness."
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."
"The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture."
"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."
"Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another."
Quotes about Dreams
"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."
"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
"Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?"
"Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy."
"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."
"Happiness is a result of fulfilled dreams."
"What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes."
"The madman is a dreamer awake."
Motivational Quotes
"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
"When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it."
"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
Quotes on Religion
"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."
"Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion."
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
"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."
"If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it."
"Religious doctrines ... are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."
"Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
"Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor."
"Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man."
General Quotes
"Where id is, there shall ego be."
"There are no mistakes."
"Time spent with cats is never wasted."
"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."
"The goal of all life is death."
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."
"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."
"It goes without saying that 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."