Sigmund Freud quotes - page 6

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. (Sigmund Freud)
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions. View quote
Sigmund Freud
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. View quote
Sigmund Freud
The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones. View quote
Sigmund Freud
A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist. View quote
Sigmund Freud
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice-that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. View quote
Sigmund Freud
A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity. (Sigmund Freud)
In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the psychic forces, which operate whether in combination or opposition, to produce the dream. This accomplished by investigation will terminate as it will reach the point where the problem of the dream meets broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material. View quote
Sigmund Freud
We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva. View quote
Sigmund Freud
If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority. View quote
Sigmund Freud
We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression ... We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious - that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way. View quote
Sigmund Freud
And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say - the last and the most profound. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself. (Sigmund Freud)
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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? View quote
Sigmund Freud
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is. View quote
Sigmund Freud