Sigmund Freud

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We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Strong
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The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horse back, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Horse
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What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Wish
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A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Believe
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There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Dream
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Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Dream
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The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Voice
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At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Art
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The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Reality
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In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Psychological
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Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Mastery
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In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Running
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Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Fall
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We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Change
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So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Two
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I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Truth
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At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Father
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I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Hard Work
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When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Caring
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I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Use
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One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Giving Up
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Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Cute
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A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Father
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It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Children
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That which we can't remember, we will repeat.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Remember
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The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Behavior
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If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Mother
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When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Religious
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The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Paranoid
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Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Self
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If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Life
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Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Pain
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A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Men
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But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Effort
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Pain
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The madman is a dreamer awake
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Dreamer
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None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Wisdom
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A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Anger
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A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Ideas
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The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Children
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[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Children
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The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Father
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It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Gowns
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I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Believe
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The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Religion
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I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Memories
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We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Hysteria
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Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Feelings
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The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.
- Sigmund Freud
Collection: Life