Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the creator of psychoanalysis. He developed an entirely new way of the study of human character. He is widely regarded as amongst the greatest influential — and controversial minds of the 20th century.
Below is a collection of inspiring thoughtful, insightful, and wise Sigmund Freud quotes that we have gathered from various sources throughout the decades.
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Sigmund Freud’s Quotes that tell a lot about ourselves
- “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud
2. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud
3. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud
4. “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
― Sigmund Freud
5. “Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud
6. “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud
7. “A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud
8. “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud
9. “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
― Sigmund Freud
10. “Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Quotes
11. “The madman is a dreamer awake”
― S. Freud
12. “America is a mistake, a giant mistake.”
― Sigmund Freud
13. “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
― Sigmund Freud
14. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
― Sigmund Freud
15. “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”
― Sigmund Freud
16. “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”
― Sigmund Freud
17. “The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
― Sigmund Freud
18. “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
― Sigmund Freud
19. “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― Sigmund Freud
20. “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Best Quotes
21. “Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”
― Sigmund Freud
22. “Where id is, there shall ego be”
― Sigmund Freud
23. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved”
― Freud
24. “The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud
25. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”
― Sigmund Freud
26. “He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
27. “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
― Sigmund Freud
28. “The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
― Sigmund Freud
29. “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
― Sigmund Freud
30. “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Life Quotes,
31. “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
― Sigmund Freud
32. “The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
― Sigmund Freud
33. “Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
34. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
35. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
36. “public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.”
― Sigmund Freud
37. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
― Sigmund Freud
38. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
39. “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”
― Sigmund Freud
40. “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”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Quotes About Life
41. “It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud
42. “Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.”
― Freud Sigmund
43. “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
― Sigmund Freud
44. “In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”
― Sigmund Freud
45. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
46. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
47. “A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.”
― Sigmund Freud
48. “Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.”
― Sigmund Freud
49. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
50. “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Quotes on Love
51. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
52. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
53. “Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss”
― Sigmund Freud
54. “You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”
― Sigmund Freud
55. “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.”
― Sigmund Freud
56. “The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”
― Sigmund Freud
57. “I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”
― Sigmund Freud
58. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
― Sigmund Freud
59. “The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.”
― Sigmund Freud
60. “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
Top 20 Sigmund Freud Quotes
61. “A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
― Sigmund Freud
62. “Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud
63. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
― Sigmund Freud
64. “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
― Sigmund Freud
65. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
― Sigmund Freud
66. “Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”
― Sigmund Freud
67. “Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.”
― Sigmund Freud
68. “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.”
― Sigmund Freud
69. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”
― Sigmund Freud
70. “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct….”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Quotes
71. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
― Sigmund Freud
72. “He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.”
― Sigmund Freud
73. “And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
“74. We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.”
― Sigmund Freud
75. “I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member”
― Sigmund Freud
76. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. — A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.”
― Sigmund Freud
77. “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love”
― Sigmund Freud
78. “Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
― Sigmund Freud
79. “dream is the dreamer’s own psychical act.”
― Sigmund Freud,
80. “Everyone owes nature a death.”
― Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud Best Quotes
81. “The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.”
― Sigmund Freud
82. “Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.”
― Sigmund Freud
83. “We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”
― Sigmund Freud
84. “We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
― Sigmund Freud
85. “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.”
― Sigmund Freud
86. “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed”
― Sigmund Freud
87. “If children could, if adults knew.”
― Sigmund Freud
88. “The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.”
― Sigmund Freud
89. “Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.”
― Sigmund Freud
90. “In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.”
― Sigmund Freud
One of Sigmund Freud’s quotes was your favorite?
Sigmund Freud was among the most influential minds of the 20th century.
He developed a totally fresh approach to the understanding of human behavior and left an indelible impression on the psychology of our time.
After his death, Freud’s thought-provoking theories remain an integral component of neuroscience, psychology, and culture.
We hope that his words have motivated you to achieve your maximum potential and to leave a lasting legacy that can stand in the face of time.
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