Quotes by 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 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.”

“How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved”

“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.”

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort”

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

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”

“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”

“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.”

“Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.”

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.”

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness”

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

“Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature”

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature”

“People are made either to sufffer or to destroy.”

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

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

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.