Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Sigmund Freud (Austrian Psychiatrist)

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist. He is the founder of psychoanalysis—both as a theory of personality and as a psychotherapeutic practice.

Born of Jewish parents at Freiberg, in Moravia, present-day Czech Republic, Freud lived and worked in Vienna for most of his life. He fled to London in 1938 following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

Freud developed important theories about the constitution and the functioning of the mind and the desires, conflicts, and motives that drive human behavior. He proposed the existence of an unconscious element in the mind, which influences consciousness. He was the first to highlight the conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious processes in normal and neurotic behavior.

Freud also formulated psychoanalytical techniques for analyzing normal and abnormal behavior. He posited that many illnesses with no evident organic cause could be treated by psychoanalysis.

Though many of Freud’s ideas have been rejected, revised, and modified since his death, they have been a significant influence on psychiatry. Many of Freud’s concepts—e.g., Oedipus complex, repression, the death instinct, penis envy, narcissism, Freudian slips—continue to be used in scholarly and in everyday discourse.

Critics question the predictive validity of psychotherapy’s hypotheses; they argue that Freud’s subjective discernments are merely retrospective. Irrespective of the persistent debates over the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, Freud himself is a writer of high distinction. His works include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899,) Totem and Taboo (1913,) and The Ego and the Id (1923.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sigmund Freud

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, Property, Communism

One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Resilience

Thought is action in rehearsal.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Thinking, General

The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it a distance from the conscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Lies

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

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Women

One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Affection

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Solitude

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: God

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Childhood, Religion

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion, Achievement

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

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
Topics: Reality

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Doctors, Medicine

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
Topics: Mental Illness

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness

One is very crazy when in love.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love

These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.
—Sigmund Freud

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Society

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness

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
Topics: Feelings, Family

When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.
—Sigmund Freud

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: Wisdom, Business, Happiness

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

Work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work, at least, he is securely attached to a part of reality, the human community.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Work

Religion … the universal … neurosis of humanity.
—Sigmund Freud

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Conscience

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Feminism

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Children

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: Girls, Children

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