Sigmund Freud

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

If youth knew; if age could.

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

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

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

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.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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

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.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

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

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.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

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

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

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

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

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

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

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

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

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.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

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.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

The ego is not master in its own house.

The goal of all life is death.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

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.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

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

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

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

If you can't do it, give up!

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

One is very crazy when in love.

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

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

Anatomy is destiny.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.