Sigmund Freud
Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.Collection: Thinking
In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.Collection: Distance
Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.Collection: Love
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.Collection: Silence
The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.Collection: Civilization
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.Collection: Hypocrite
[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.Collection: Children
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.Collection: Culture
Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.Collection: Powerful
In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.Collection: Choices
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.Collection: Love
Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.Collection: Self
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.Collection: Writing
Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.Collection: Inspirational
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.Collection: Differences
The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.Collection: God
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.Collection: Lying
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.Collection: Motivational
We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.Collection: Sex
One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.Collection: Mean
The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.Collection: Wish
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.Collection: Teamwork
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.Collection: Moving
There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.Collection: Men
The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.Collection: Development
The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.Collection: Passion
A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!Collection: Facts
Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.Collection: Lust
Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.Collection: Keys
We must love or we grow ill.Collection: Ill
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.Collection: Hatred
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.Collection: Discovery
The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.Collection: Men
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.Collection: Intense
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.Collection: Crush
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.Collection: Happiness
The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.Collection: Civilization
Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carryCollection: Kind
Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.Collection: Truth
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistadorCollection: Adventure
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.Collection: Scientific Method
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.Collection: Children
The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.Collection: Religious
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. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.Collection: Race
In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?Collection: Effort
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]Collection: Men
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.Collection: Doe
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.Collection: Father
A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.Collection: Dream