SFSigmund Freud

146 collected words

Sigmund Freud

Dates not recorded

Author attribution printed in a contributor-provided reference. Basic identity; lifetime and independent quotation authenticity are not established here.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

Sigmund Freud / quote

02Undated

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Sigmund Freud / quote

03Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

04Undated

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

Sigmund Freud / quote

05Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

06Undated

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.

Sigmund Freud / quote

07Undated

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.

Sigmund Freud / quote

08Undated

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

Sigmund Freud / quote

09Undated

At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side: tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.

Sigmund Freud / quote

10Undated

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.

Sigmund Freud / quote

11Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

12Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

13Undated

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

Sigmund Freud / quote

14Undated

...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another.

Sigmund Freud / quote

15Undated

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.

Sigmund Freud / quote

16Undated

Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.

Sigmund Freud / quote

17Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

18Undated

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

Sigmund Freud / quote

19Undated

We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.

Sigmund Freud / quote

20Undated

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

Sigmund Freud / quote

21Undated

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

Sigmund Freud / quote

22Undated

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

Sigmund Freud / quote

23Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote

24Undated

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

Sigmund Freud / quote