Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence.

— Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud Quotes

Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient’s recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.

— Sigmund Freud

It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man’s need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for him a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.

— Sigmund Freud

The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.

— Sigmund Freud

The reaction to these claims of impulse and these threats of danger, a reaction in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested, may be guided correctly by the pleasure-principle or by the reality-principle which modifies this.

— Sigmund Freud

The details of the process by which repression changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of ‘pain’ are not yet fully understood, or are not yet capable of clear presentation, but it is certain that all neurotic ‘pain’ is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such.

— Sigmund Freud

The act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union.

— Sigmund Freud

The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.

— Sigmund Freud

The profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight.

— Sigmund Freud

But even so, one can just as well hold God responsible for the existence of the devil as for the evil he personifies.

— Sigmund Freud

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

— Sigmund Freud

Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.

— Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.

— Sigmund Freud

Nevertheless several things might be said in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion. 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.

— Sigmund Freud

Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.

— Sigmund Freud

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.

— Sigmund Freud

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

— Sigmund Freud

We never lose what we really want.

— Sigmund Freud

Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.

— Sigmund Freud

What one forgets once he will often forget again.

— Sigmund Freud

Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy...

— Sigmund Freud
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