Sigmund Freud ( born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. In 2001, Time Magazine referred to Freud as one of the most important thinkers of the last century. A 2006 Newsweek article called him “history’s most debunked doctor.”
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
“The madman is a dreamer awake”
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
“The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”
“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
“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.”
“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.”
“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”
“Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. 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.”
“Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.”
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
“America is a mistake, a giant mistake.”
“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
“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.”
“The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.”
“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
“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.”
