Quotes from Sigmund Freud

The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

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.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.

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.

To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

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

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

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.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.