Sigmund Freud Quotes

"Where id is, there shall ego be."

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

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

"A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable. Ch. 6"

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

"Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)"

"The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girls clitoris. Lecture 31, "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality' (1933)."

"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct."

"Anxiety is a signal of unpleasure."

"I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Studies on Hysteria (1895), (co-written with Josef Breuer) as translated by Nicola Luckhurst (2004)"

"Translation: A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success. From The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones, Vol. I, ch. 1 (1953) p. 5"

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

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)"

"Gesammelte Schriften, Volume 6" (1924), p. 183"

"We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us."

"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. Fragments of an Analysis with Freud, ch.3 '22 January 1935' (1954) by Joseph Wortis; as quoted in Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations by Robert Andrews, Penguin Books, 2001."

"The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id. The Anatomy of the Mental Personality (Lecture 31)"

"The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature."

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

"The aim of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious."

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. Dora : An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), his analysis of the case of Ida Bauer (also translated as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria)"

"Anxiety is the reaction to the danger of being separated."

"Es braucht nicht gesagt zu werden, daß eine Kultur, welche eine so große Zahl von Teilnehmern unbefriedigt läßt und zur Auflehnung treibt, weder Aussicht hat, sich dauernd zu erhalten, noch es verdient. 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."

"Ich bin nämlich gar kein Mann der Wissenschaft, kein Beobachter, kein Experimentator, kein Denker. Ich bin nichts als ein Conquistadorentemperament, ein Abenteurer, wenn Du es übersetzt willst, mit der Neugierde, der Kühnheit und der Zähigkeit eines solchen."

"translated by James Strachey"

"Wenn man der unbestrittene Liebling der Mutter gewesen ist, so behält man fürs Leben jenes Eroberergefühl, jene Zuversicht des Erfolges, welche nicht selten wirklich den Erfolg nach sich zieht. Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus »Dichtung und Wahrheit«, first published in the journal Imago, vol. 5 issue 2 (1917), p. 57 books.google = http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29946/29946-h/29946-h.htm"

"The ego feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego instead of being loved."

"A great deal of anxiety is fundamentally a fear of the conscience."

"Anxiety is the expectation of danger."

"The first state of anxiety... arose on the occasion of the separation from the mother."

"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of the subconscious from which it rises."

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Feb. 1, 1900. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (1985)."

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. On his seventieth birthday (1926); as quoted in The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling"