Unlock insights into human psychology and gain a deeper understanding of desires and the unconscious through a collection of Sigmund Freud quotes.
Sigmund Freud pioneering contributions continue to influence psychology, literature, and culture at large. Freud’s insight on the unconscious, dreams, and the complexities of human behavior laid the foundation for modern psychoanalysis.
Beyond his extensive body of work, Sigmund Freud quotes encapsulate his profound observations on the human nature. Each quote serves as a window into Freud’s transformative ideas, offering us glimpses of his revolutionary theories and thought-provoking reflections.
Today, we invite you to join us in unraveling the layers of human consciousness through our selection of 100 Sigmund Freud quotes. May his profound wisdom of a man who dedicated his life to unveiling the mysteries that lie within us all.
Sigmund Freud famous quotes
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Sigmund Freud
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud
Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.
Sigmund Freud
We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
Sigmund Freud
I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.
Sigmund Freud
In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
Sigmund Freud
We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
Sigmund Freud
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Sigmund Freud
To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.
Sigmund Freud
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes about life
In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
Sigmund Freud
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
Sigmund Freud
All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
Sigmund Freud
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Sigmund Freud
Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.
Sigmund Freud
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
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
I’ve been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes about death
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 carry.
Sigmund Freud
The goal of all life is death.
Sigmund Freud
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Sigmund Freud
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
Sigmund Freud
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Sigmund Freud
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?
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
Sigmund Freud
The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.
Sigmund Freud
Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes about dreams
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.
Sigmund Freud
The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever… because they already live in a dream world.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Sigmund Freud
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
Sigmund Freud
The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
Sigmund Freud
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
The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.
Sigmund Freud
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes about reality
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
Sigmund Freud
The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
Sigmund Freud
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer.
Sigmund Freud
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
Sigmund Freud
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Sigmund Freud
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
Sigmund Freud
Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
Sigmund Freud
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
Sigmund Freud
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
These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
Sigmund Freud
Funny Sigmund Freud quotes
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’
Sigmund Freud
A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
Sigmund Freud
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
Sigmund Freud
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
Sigmund Freud
If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.
Sigmund Freud
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
Sigmund Freud
If youth knew; if age could.
Sigmund Freud
Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes love
Love is a state of temporary psychosis.
Sigmund Freud
One is very crazy when in love.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
Sigmund Freud
In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.
Sigmund Freud
Without love we fall ill.
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
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
Sigmund Freud
All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.
Sigmund Freud
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes on desire
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.
Sigmund Freud
Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.
Sigmund Freud
Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.
Sigmund Freud
The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.
Sigmund Freud
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
Sigmund Freud
The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
Sigmund Freud
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Sigmund Freud
The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud quotes on mind
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
Sigmund Freud
I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud
The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage — in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level…
Sigmund Freud
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
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud
Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Sigmund Freud
Inspirational Sigmund Freud quotes
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
Sigmund Freud
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
Sigmund Freud
History is just new people making old mistakes.
Sigmund Freud
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
Sigmund Freud
Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
Sigmund Freud
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.
Sigmund Freud
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
Sigmund Freud
The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.
Sigmund Freud
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
Sigmund Freud
Final thoughts
Sigmund Freud quotes offer us profound insights into the complexities of the human mind and behavior. These quotes emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and introspection in our quest for self-understanding and personal growth.
They invite us to grapple with the intricate interplay of desires, fears, and unconscious processes that drive human behavior. Whether one agrees with his theories entirely or not, Sigmund Freud quotes undeniably spark contemplation.
By taking the time to ponder these quotes, we open ourselves up to new perspectives on our thoughts and actions. So, allow these Sigmund Freud quotes serve as a catalyst for self-exploration, reminding us of the enduring relevance of his contributions to psychology’s world.
Did you found enjoyment and inspiration in our curated selection of Sigmund Freud quotes? If so, feel to share them with others who might also find value in exploring the depths of human consciousness.
Thank you for taking the time to engage with Sigmund Freud quotes and consider the intricacies of the human mind. Let us embrace the journey of self-awareness, knowing that by grappling with our innermost thoughts, we pave the way for a fulfilling life.