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Sigmund Freud Quotes
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147 Quotes About Human Psychology and Mind Mysteries

Discover the profound insights of Sigmund Freud through his most famous quotes. Explore the depths of human psychology and the mysteries of the mind.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychological issues stemming from conflicts in the mind. Born to Jewish parents in Austria, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 and established his clinical practice in Vienna. He developed therapeutic techniques such as free association and transference, revolutionizing the field of psychology. Freud's theories encompassed topics like sexual development, dreams, the unconscious mind, and the structure of the psyche. His work also explored religion and culture. Despite controversy surrounding psychoanalysis, Freud's influence on contemporary Western thought and popular culture remains significant.

Psychoanalysis, although declining as a diagnostic tool, still holds sway in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the humanities. It continues to spark debates about its efficacy and scientific status, as well as its impact on feminism. Nevertheless, Freud's ideas have permeated modern society extensively. As poet W. H. Auden wrote in 1940, Freud created "a whole climate of opinion" that shapes how we live our lives today.

✵ 6. May 1856 – 23. September 1939
Sigmund Freud photo
Sigmund Freud: 147   quotes 82   likes

Sigmund Freud Quotes

“Woe to you, my Princess, when I come… you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

Sigmund Freud

Letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays (2 June 1884)
1880s

Girl , Princess

“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.”

Sigmund Freud

Source: 1920s, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 5, as translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud (1961)

Love , People

“The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.”

Sigmund Freud book Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism (1938)
1930s

God , Religion , Time , Christ

“The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.”

Sigmund Freud

1920s, The Ego and the Id (1923)

“We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us.
:”

Sigmund Freud

1910s

Understanding

“At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.”

Sigmund Freud book Totem and Taboo

Totem and Taboo : Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)
1910s

God

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

Sigmund Freud

Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality (1935)
1930s

“Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.”

Sigmund Freud

1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)

Feeling , Home

“Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar.”

Sigmund Freud

Psychology professor Alan C. Elms stated in the article “Apocryphal Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Most Famous ‘Quotations’ and Their Actual Sources.” (2001): "In this case, however, not only do we lack any written record of Freud as the direct source, but also there are many reasons to conclude that Freud never said it or anything like it." Quote tracking done by the Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/
Misattributed

“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.”

Sigmund Freud

Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 3

Idea , Nature

“It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe."”

Sigmund Freud

1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)

Universe

“I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.”

Sigmund Freud

Psycho-analysis and faith: the letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister (1963 edition)
Attributed from posthumous publications

Thinking

“Psychoanalysis … should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual.”

Sigmund Freud

Letter number 80 to James Jackson Putnam, March 30, 1914, in James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis: Letters between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sandor Ferenczi, and Morton Prince, 1877-1917 (Harvard University Press: 1971), p. 170
1910s

“A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.”

Sigmund Freud

"Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937)
1930s

“And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound.”

Sigmund Freud

Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (7 August 1901)
1900s

Problem

“Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years. …They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.”

Sigmund Freud book Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
1920s

“This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”

Sigmund Freud

A remark about the Irish, quoted as a statement of Freud's in the Oscar-winning movie The Departed, there is no evidence Freud ever said it http://www.freud.org.uk/about/faq/.
Misattributed

People

“…three of life's most important areas: work, love, and taking responsibility.”

Sigmund Freud

From The Wolf-man and Sigmund Freud Muriel Gardiner, p. 365 (cf. books.google.com http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Wolf_Man_and_Sigmund_Freud.html?id=TJoC54vuCmwC)
Attributed from posthumous publications

Love , Life

“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.”

Sigmund Freud

As quoted in his obituary, in the New York Times, 24 September, 1939
Attributed from posthumous publications

Sun

“In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?”

Sigmund Freud

Letter to Dr. David Feuchtwang (1931), as quoted in Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home (1990) by Emanuel Rice, p. 25
1930s

Age , Soul , Effort

“Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.”

Sigmund Freud book Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism (1938)
1930s

Death , Soul , Idea , Nature

“What does a woman want?”

Sigmund Freud

[Freud] said once to Marie Bonaparte: '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: Life and Work (Hogarth Press, 1953) by Ernest Jones, Vol. 2, Pt. 3, Ch. 16, p. 421. In a footnote Jones gives the original German, "Was will das Weib?" (cf. books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=yhmTi49nf7cC&q=weib)
Translated by Gertrud Meili-Dworetzki with the cooperation of Katherine Jones in the German version of Jones book: Das Leben und Werk von Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, Bern and Stuttgart 1962, p. 493, into: Die große Frage, die nie beantwortet worden ist und die ich trotz dreißig Jahre langem Forschen in der weiblichen Seele nicht habe beantworten können, ist die: 'Was will das Weib?
Attributed from posthumous publications

“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”

Sigmund Freud

This is not a statement that has been found in any translation of any of Freud's known works. It is a paraphrase of a statement from the essay "Guns, Murders, and the Constitution" (February 1990) http://www.guncite.com/journals/gun_control_katesreal.html by Don B. Kates, Jr. where Kates summarizes his views of passages in Dreams in Folklore (1958) by Freud and David E. Oppenheim, while disputing statements by Emmanuel Tanay in "Neurotic Attachment to Guns" in a 1976 edition of The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1955) by Robert Mitchell Lindner:
Dr. Tanay is perhaps unaware of — in any event, he does not cite — other passages more relevant to his argument. In these other passages Freud associates retarded sexual and emotional development not with gun ownership, but with fear and loathing of weapons. The probative importance that ought to be attached to the views of Freud is, of course, a matter of opinion. The point here is only that those views provide no support for the penis theory of gun ownership.
After reading of this essay and its citations, this paraphrase of an opinion about Freud's ideas has been attributed to Freud himself, and specifically to his 10th Lecture "Symbolism in Dreams" in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis on some internet forum pages: alt.quotations http://groups.google.com/group/alt.quotations/msg/5fc8dd0f7d56981e, uk.politics.guns http://groups.google.com/group/uk.politics.guns/msg/4ad060e213bc5b6b, talk.politics.guns http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.guns/msg/7fbce4b3fa5324a7, can.talk.guns http://groups.google.com/group/can.talk.guns/msg/a57bc07124e64fba , etc.
One of the statements by Freud which Kates summarized from in Dreams in Folklore (1958), p. 33, reads: "The representation of the penis as a weapon, cutting knife, dagger etc., is familiar to us from the anxiety dreams of abstinent women in particular and also lies at the root of numerous phobias in neurotic people."
Misattributed

Fear

“Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.”

Sigmund Freud

Alledgedly written in 'The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes', but Freud neither says this nor argues this exact sentiment. Possible originates from Donna Stewart https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.36.14.0009
Misattributed

Women , Change

“The mind is like an iceberg.”

Sigmund Freud

According to this Google Search result https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1800%2Ccd_max%3A1920%2Clr%3Alang_1en&tbm=bks&ei=RxfhW-PSCdfbhwOOwYrYBQ&q=%22the+mind+is+like+an+iceberg%22&oq=%22the+mind+is+like+an+iceberg%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3...364980.365440.0.366452.4.4.0.0.0.0.108.108.0j1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..3.0.0....0.cttgYpsxz1o, the earliest reference on this quote belongs to Hon. B. G. Northrop in 1884. But the person who popularized it might be G. Stanley Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Stanley_Hall.
Misattributed