Quotes from Sigmund Freud

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.

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.

I suppose that romantic love was invented as a brilliant means of seduction.

Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.

One is very crazy when in love.

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 aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those "impossible" professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing-up of children and the government of nations.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

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

Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.

The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

The poor ego… serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.

Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a giant mistake.

No one believes in his own death.

By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.