Quotes from Sigmund Freud

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

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.

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

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.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

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.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

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.

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

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.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

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.

Anatomy is destiny.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....