Sigmund Freud quotes - page 9

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger, it will soon have your whole hand. (Sigmund Freud)
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression. View quote
Sigmund Freud
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past. View quote
Sigmund Freud
It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. View quote
Sigmund Freud
No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to. (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 premisses 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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality. View quote
Sigmund Freud
I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious. View quote
Sigmund Freud
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. View quote
Sigmund Freud
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever. View quote
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 outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion. View quote
Sigmund Freud
We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.... View quote
Sigmund Freud
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness. (Sigmund Freud)
The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them. View quote
Sigmund Freud
And in the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as a civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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. View quote
Sigmund Freud
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 measuresThere are three such measures powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery substitute satisfactions, which diminish it and intoxicating substances which make us insensitive to it. View quote
Sigmund Freud