The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Anger
The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Illusion
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Birth
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Happiness, Wisdom, Business
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Liberty
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Children
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day—until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Authority
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Ego, Psychiatry
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as “right” in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as “brute force.”
—Sigmund Freud
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Discovery, Self-Discovery
Religion … the universal … neurosis of humanity.
—Sigmund Freud
Where id was, there shall ego be.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Maturity
The mind is like an iceberg—it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mind, The Mind
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Letters
I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments… but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Socialism, Communism, Property
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
—Sigmund Freud
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
Topics: Anger
The ego is not master in its own house.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Thought, Ego
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
Topics: Women
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: Life
The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl’s clitoris.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Man, Body, Mankind
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion, Illusion
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Children, Girls
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
Topics: The Mind, Mind
The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it a distance from the conscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Lies
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
- Viktor Frankl Austrian Psychiatrist
- Richard Feynman American Physicist
- Hans Bethe American Physicist
- Steven Weinberg American Physicist
- Carl Reiner American Comedian
- Wilhelm Reich Austrian Psychoanalyst
- Friedrich Hayek British Economist, Social Philosopher
- Karl Popper Austrian-born British Philosopher
- Martin Buber Austrian Jewish Philosopher
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