Sigmund Freud: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”

“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”

“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea, they become powerless when they oppose it.”

“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”

“I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”

“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”

“No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.”

“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.”

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

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

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

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

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

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”

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