Quotes from Sigmund Freud

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind – separate from the conscious mind that is constantly at work molding our thought, feelings, and actions.

There is only one state- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.

The dream shows how recollections of one's everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended.

It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.

A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements—at any rate, in certain fields (Memory).

If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into hap-hazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, thought they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure. Mental paitents are split and broken structures of this same kind.... They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, physical reality...

Rather than living our lives, we are ''lived'' by unknown and uncontrollable forces.

According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.

Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.

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.

The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.

Woman ... what does she want?

Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.

Freud said to Putnam: We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

Quite often they are lines of thought starting out from more than one centre, but not without their points of contact; almost invariably one train of thought is accompanied by its contradictory opposite, associatively linked to it by contrast.

there is no such thing as an unconscious no.

what we know to be useless, but expect civilization to value, is beauty;

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.

Every man is a poet at heart.