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Sigmund Freud


"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.""One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.""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?'""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 intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.""I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.""Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.""Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?""A woman should soften but not weaken a man.""Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.""Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.""It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement.""Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair.""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 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.""He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.""When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.""Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.""Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.""Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.""In the depths of my heart, I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.""Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.""Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.""The ego is not master in its own house.""The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.""The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer.""The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct.""Where id was, there ego shall be.""In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself.""One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse.""It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.""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.""Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.""Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.""The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it.""Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation.""The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three.""At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away.""The repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it.""Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.""There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle.""The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.""Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id.""The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.""The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling.""The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.""Everyone has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.""The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.""We are what we are because we have been what we have been.""Dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires.""Dreams with a painful content are to be analyzed as the fulfillments of wishes.""Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor.""The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream.""The dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought.""Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet.""Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.""If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends.""Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.""The scope of one’s personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.""Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, make sure that you’re not surrounded by fools.""When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.""Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.""Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.""Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.""Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.""No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.""Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”""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.""Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have so to speak pawned a part of their narcissism.""In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.""A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.""Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.""Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.""The madman is a dreamer awake.""Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.""No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.""I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole.""Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy.""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.""We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.""The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.""The goal of all life is death.""What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.""Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.""The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.""Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.""The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.""Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.""America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.""The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."