Sigmund Freud Quotes, Status, and Thoughts

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

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

The madman is a dreamer awake

My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

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

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

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

When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.

The goal of all life is death

I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.

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 the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

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

All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.

A strong egoism is a protection.

If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.

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

Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.

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

Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.

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

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

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

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!

Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry

If you can't do it, give up!

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

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

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

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

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.

Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

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.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

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.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

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.

I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

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

To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.

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.

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.

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

The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.

The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

Love is a state of temporary psychosis.

I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

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?'

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

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

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.

We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.