Sigmund Freud quotes

“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.”

— Sigmund Freud

“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.”

— Sigmund Freud

“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. ”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

“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.”

— Sigmund Freud

“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.”

— Sigmund Freud

“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?”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

“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.”

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud