Top 68 Sigmund Freud Quotes (That Will Change Your Life)

Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856, to Sept. 23, 1939) founded psychoanalysis, a treatment technique that involves the patient talking to a psychoanalyst.

Though Sigmund Freud quotes and ideas were controversial, he was one of the most influential scientists in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. It has been over 100 years since Freud published his theories, yet he still influences what we think about personality and the mind.

Sigmund Freud Quotes

• A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
• A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
• 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.
• 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.
• A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
• America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
• America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
• Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
• Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
• Anatomy is destiny.
• Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
• Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
• Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
• Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
• Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
• 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.
• Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
• Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
• He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
• 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.
• I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
• 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.
• If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
• If youth knew; if age could.
• 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.
• 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?
• It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
• 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.
• Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
• Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
• Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
• 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.
• Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
• Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
• Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
• 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.
• 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.
• One is very crazy when in love.
• Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
• Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
• The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
• 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.
• The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
• The ego is not master in its own house.
• The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
• The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
• The goal of all life is death.
• 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.
• 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?”
• The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
• The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
• The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
• The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
• The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
• The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
• The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
• Time spent with cats is never wasted.
• We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
• We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
• 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.
• What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
• 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.
• Where id was, their ego shall be.
• Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
• Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.