Sigmund Freud
In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.Collection: Science
Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.Collection: Love
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 ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.Collection: Men
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot loveCollection: Men
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.Collection: Atheism
The communal life of human beings had . . . a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.Collection: Love
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.Collection: Pain
The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.Collection: Love
public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.Collection: Self
The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.Collection: Life
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.Collection: Ideas
Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.Collection: Religious
A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.Collection: Strong
The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three...The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.Collection: Tyrants
Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.Collection: Religious
The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.Collection: Ideas
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.Collection: Love
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.Collection: Baby
It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.Collection: Majority
Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.Collection: People
I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.Collection: Believe
One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.Collection: Mean
The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.Collection: Games
I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.Collection: Powerful
Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.Collection: Deceit
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.Collection: Decision
It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.Collection: Religious
The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.Collection: Dream
A strong egoism is a protection.Collection: Strong
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.Collection: Love
All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.Collection: Giving
Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.Collection: Past
Not all men are worthy of love.Collection: Men
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.Collection: Magic
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.Collection: Success
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.Collection: Sex
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.Collection: Dream
All that matters is love and work.Collection: Sweet
Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.Collection: Humanity
I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.Collection: Life
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.Collection: Lazy
Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.Collection: Writing
The goal of all life is deathCollection: Life
The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.Collection: Dream
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.Collection: Authority
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 themselvesCollection: Love Relationship
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?Collection: Life
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.Collection: Death
Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.Collection: Family