Quotes from Sigmund Freud

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

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.

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

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.

Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss

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

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

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.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.