Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
"He sido un hombre afortunado en la vida, nada me ha sido facil." "I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easy"
It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.
A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers.
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.
A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us O'er the world's tempestuous sea; Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, For we have no help but Thee.
The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
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 tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
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.
Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.
Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.
Dividing the swing into its parts is like dissecting a cat. You'll have blood and guts and bones all over the place. But you won't have a cat.
Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
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
[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
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.