Reading Exercise: Freud Quotes

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?“ Sigmund Freud 

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. Sigmund Freud 

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.  Sigmund Freud 

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

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. Sigmund Freud 

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. Sigmund Freud

I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole 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.  Sigmund Freud 

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. Sigmund Freud 

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. Sigmund Freud 

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

Words have a magical power Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions. SIGMUND FREUD

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs. SIGMUND FREUD

Unexpressed emotions will never die Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. SIGMUND FREUD

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. SIGMUND FREUD

Whoever loves becomes humble Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism. 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 shall not question.” SIGMUND FREUD

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it, we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.”  SIGMUND FREUD

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

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.  SIGMUND FREUD

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves SIGMUND FREUD

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

As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude. SIGMUND FREUD

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. SIGMUND FREUD

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter. SIGMUND FREUD

What is common in all these dreams is obvious What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes. SIGMUND FREUD

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions. SIGMUND FREUD

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect". SIGMUND FREUD

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other.  SIGMUND FREUD

The dream shows how recollections of one’s everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended. SIGMUND FREUD