Quotes by Sigmund Freud

About Sigmund Freud:

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, now known as the father of psychoanalysis. Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881, and then carried out research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology in the same year and became an affiliated professor (professor extraordinarius) in 1902.
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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Sigmund Freud

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men....

Sigmund Freud

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

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

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.

Sigmund Freud

Homo homini lupus [man is 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

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Sigmund Freud

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

Sigmund Freud

In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a...

Sigmund Freud

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken b...

Sigmund Freud

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves

Sigmund Freud

It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.

Sigmund Freud

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 sen...

Sigmund Freud

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, rigidit...

Sigmund Freud

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Sigmund Freud

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

Sigmund Freud

It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose thei...

Sigmund Freud

Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing l...

Sigmund Freud

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of rec...

Sigmund Freud

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

Sigmund Freud

In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

Author Bio

  • NameSigmund Freud
  • DescriptionAustrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis
  • AliasesSigismund Schlomo Freud; Freud
  • BornMay 6, 1856
  • DiedSeptember 23, 1939
  • CountryAustria
  • ProfessionPsychoanalyst; Neurologist; Science Writer; Essayist
  • AwardsGoethe Prize