Quotes from Sigmund Freud

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

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

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

When a member of my family complains to me of having bitten his tongue, pinched a finger, or the like, he does not get the sympathy he hopes for but instead the question: "Why did you do that?"

The goal of all life is death.

The creative writer acts no differently from the child at play: he creates a fantasy world, which he takes very seriously; that is to say, he invests large amounts of emotion in it, while marking it off sharply from reality.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

The new psychoanalytic method [is]… somewhat subtle but irreplaceable, so fruitful has it proved to be in explaining obscure unconscious mental processes.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

Before the problem of the creative writer, analysis must lay down its arms.

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.

No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

A culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence nor deserves it.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they could have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.

If youth knew if age could.

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.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

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.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it — the present, that is to say, must have become the past — before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.