Sigmund Freud Quotes

"One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself."

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."

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

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

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations"

"From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."

"Love and work...work and love, that's all there is."

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise"

"Where id was, there shall ego be."

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity"

"Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man"

"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief"

"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."

"We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other."

"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."

"Conscience is the internal perception of the reaction of a particular wish operating within us"