100 Best Sigmund Freud Quotes From The Founder Of Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, a neurologist by profession, was the pioneer and the father of psychoanalysis which we loosely call therapy in the 21st century.

Not only did he develop therapeutic processes to relieve patients from mental stress and trauma in their mind, but he also discovered the process of transference, which is vital when it comes to psychoanalysis. He is also famous for his countless valuable theories such as Oedipus Complex, Electra complex, and his theory on religion, how religion functions, and how our psyche is shaped by religion, and other theories which have had a major impact on the world.

He also believed that unexpressed emotions will never go away completely, emotions will never die, they are always alive and will come forth later in uglier ways by the human mind and we will understand it one day in retrospect. One may question how to deal with these emotions and having others' ears to hear may convince you to gain strength come forth later with your emotions. His overarching themes throughout his books were civilization and its discontents in his book.

Here is a list of some of the best quotes by Freud that will make you delve deep into the world of psychoanalysis. Check out [Carl Rogers quotes] and Jean Piaget quotes too.

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories on love have been held in high regard. Here are quotes by Freud on love and other theories.

1. "Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief."

-Sigmund Freud.

2. "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

-Sigmund Freud.

3. "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.

4. "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.

5. "The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation."

-Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization And Its Discontents'.

6. "We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."

-Sigmund Freud.

7. "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."

-Sigmund Freud.

8. "Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

-Sigmund Freud.

9. "We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."

-Sigmund Freud.

10. "Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?"

-Sigmund Freud.

11. "A woman should soften but not weaken a man."

-Sigmund Freud.

12. "Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery."

-Sigmund Freud.

13. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

14. "It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement..."

-Sigmund Freud.

15. "Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair."

-Sigmund Freud.

16. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

17. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

19. "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

21. "Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality."

-Sigmund Freud.

22. "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks."

-Sigmund Freud.

23. "In the depths of my heart, I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."

-Sigmund Freud.

24. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

25. "Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions."

-Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud was the first psychoanalyst who had deconstructed the ego and the id in human personality. Here is a list of quotes stating his views on theories on this subject.

26. "The ego is not master in its own house."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

28. "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer."

-Sigmund Freud.

29. "The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct."

-Sigmund Freud.

30. "Where id was, there ego shall be."

-Sigmund Freud.

31. "In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself."

-Sigmund Freud.

32. "One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse."

-Sigmund Freud.

33. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

34. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

35. "Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another."

-Sigmund Freud.

36. "Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them."

-Sigmund Freud.

37. "The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it."

-Sigmund Freud.

38. "Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation."

-Sigmund Freud.

39. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

40. "At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away."

-Sigmund Freud.

41. "The repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it."

-Sigmund Freud.

42. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world."

-Sigmund Freud.

43. "There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle."

-Sigmund Freud.

44. "The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions."

-Sigmund Freud.

45. "Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id.'

-Sigmund Freud.

46. "A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id."

-Sigmund Freud.

47. "The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id."

-Sigmund Freud.

48. " The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling."

-Sigmund Freud.

49. "The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface."

-Sigmund Freud.

If you are looking for Sigmund Freud dream quotes, this is an ideal list of interesting theories about the human mind. Dream interpretation is one of the major topics of Freud's theories. Here are quotes about dreams by Freud.

50. "Everyone has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

52. "We are what we are because we have been what we have been."

-Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

54. "Dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires."

-Sigmund Freud.

55. "Dreams with a painful content are to be analyzed as the fulfillments of wishes."

-Sigmund Freud.

56. "Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor."

-Sigmund Freud.

57. "The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream."

-Sigmund Freud.

58. "The dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought."

-Sigmund Freud.

61. "Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet."

-Sigmund Freud.

62. "Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation."

-Sigmund Freud.

63. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

Here are famous quotes from the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his works.

64. "Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

-Sigmund Freud.

65. "If youth knew; if age could."

-Sigmund Freud.

66. "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

-Sigmund Freud.

67. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

68. "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, make sure that you’re not surrounded by fools."

-Sigmund Freud.

69. "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

72. "Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

74. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization and Its Discontents'.

76. "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.

78. "Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have so to speak pawned a part of their narcissism."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

80. "A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

82. "Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine."

-Sigmund Freud.

83. "The madman is a dreamer awake."

-Sigmund Freud.

84. "Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it."

85. "No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."

-Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud had a major impact on the population when he found the path of psycho-analysis. Here are some of his impactful quotes from his theory and works in this field.

86. "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole."

-Sigmund Freud.

87. "Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy."

-Sigmund Freud.

88. "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."

-Sigmund Freud.

89. "We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious."

-Sigmund Freud.

90. "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

-Sigmund Freud.

91. "The goal of all life is death."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

93. "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."

-Sigmund Freud.

94. "The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him."

-Sigmund Freud.

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

-Sigmund Freud.

96. "Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy."

-Sigmund Freud.

97. "The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."

-Sigmund Freud.

98. "Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."

-Sigmund Freud.

99. "America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."

-Sigmund Freud.

100. "The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."

-Sigmund Freud.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Sigmund Freud quotes then why not take a look at Maslow quotes or  Albert Ellis quotes.