Quotes from Sigmund Freud


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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.


Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.


Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.


I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.


The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.


Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.


Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.


The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.


The goal of all life is death.


Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.


Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.


If youth knew; if age could.


Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.


The ego is not master in its own house.


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.


Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.


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?'


I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.


The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.


Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.