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Quotes of the day: Sigmund Freud
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Published Monday, May 06, 2013 @ 6:07 AM EDT
May 06 2013

Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. (Click for full Wikipedia article.)

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A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.

All that matters is love and work.

America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Anatomy is destiny.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

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.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.

It goes without saying that 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.

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 manifestations of their aggressiveness.

It is tragic when a man outlives his body.

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty 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.

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

No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

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 day in retrospect the year of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning to darn socks.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

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."

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 ego is not master in its own house.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of 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 history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders.

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

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

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

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

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.


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