Sigmund Freud
Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.Collection: War
There are no mistakes.Collection: Mistake
It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.Collection: Ego
The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.Collection: Attitude
The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.Collection: Loss
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.Collection: Science
Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.Collection: Depressing
You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.Collection: Numbers
When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Real
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.Collection: Funny
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.Collection: Heart
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.Collection: Sadness
Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.Collection: Natural
Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.Collection: Pain
Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.Collection: Children
Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.Collection: Dream
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.Collection: Men
Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.Collection: Writing
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.Collection: Life
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.Collection: Knowledge
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.Collection: Atheist
My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.Collection: Sorry
Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.Collection: Perception
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.Collection: Children
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.Collection: Dream
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.Collection: Believe
The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.Collection: Reality
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.Collection: Children
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.Collection: Civilization
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.Collection: Reflection
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.Collection: Life
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.Collection: Mourning
There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.Collection: Ego
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.Collection: Attitude
All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas(the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ...Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus...Rooms in dreams are usually women...Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing breidges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.Collection: Dream
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.Collection: May
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.Collection: Dream
The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.Collection: Ego
Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.Collection: Children
Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.Collection: Dream
Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.Collection: Religion
A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.Collection: Horse
Opposition is not necessarily enmity.Collection: Enmity
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.Collection: Essence
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.Collection: Support
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.Collection: Men
Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.Collection: Numbers
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' . . . We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.Collection: Happiness