Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| Sigmund Freud
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity. A great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of early wishes to escape the family and especially the father. A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. America is a mistake, a giant mistake. America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another Anatomy is destiny. Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love. At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father. Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression. Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them. Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. Conscience is the internal perception of the reaction of a particular wish operating within us. Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man. Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations. Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. 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. Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts. From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.He does not believe that does not live according to his belief . 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. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection. I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious. 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 along with it. 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. If youth knew; if age could. 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. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable. It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. 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. It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill. Love and work ... work and love, that's all there is. Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. 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 are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it. Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality. Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out and out unbeliever. Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. 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. 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. 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. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation ... We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. One is very crazy when in love. One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself. Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past. Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity. Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich american women who should be learning how to darn socks. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. Religion originate in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise. 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. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety. 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. The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim ... to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him. The ego is not master in its own house. The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. The goal of all life is death. The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other. 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 history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders. The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life. The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization. The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief. The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness. The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris. The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition. The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture. The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will. The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. Time spent with cats is never wasted. We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things. We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality. We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology. We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction. What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. What progress we are making. In the Middle ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. 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. When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. Where id was, there shall ego be. Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|