Quotes from Sigmund Freud

When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.

My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

Anatomy is destiny.

When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

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

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.

When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

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.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.