Sigmund Freud
158 quotes
Biography
"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
"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."
"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."
"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."
"A woman should soften but not weaken a man."
"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."
"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism."
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."
"It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love."
"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 intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation."
"My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection."
"Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor."
"Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any."
"The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness."
"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."
"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."
"A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer."
"I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."
"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."
"In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the psychic forces, which operate whether in combination or opposition, to produce the dream. This accomplished by investigation will terminate as it will reach the point where the problem of the dream meets broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material."
"A woman is to soften but not weaken a man."
"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 conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."
"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
"And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound."