Sigmund Freud Quotes

On chasing happiness as if it were guaranteed:

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

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

On needing coping mechanisms without feeling weak about it:

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

On realizing not all suffering in life is preventable:

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, from the external world, and from our relations to other men.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

On why throwing yourself into work helps you cope:

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work, for it gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, the human community.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

On grieving something intangible, like an identity or a dream:

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia

On wondering if your grief is too much:

Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbid condition.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia

On paying attention to what your dreams keep repeating:

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

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

On noticing what you actually want, even if you will not admit it awake:

A dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Weighing whether to risk loving again after a loss:

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, Civilization and Its Discontents

Judging yourself for a temptation you never acted on:

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

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Understanding how a childhood dynamic still shapes your confidence in a relationship:

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Sigmund Freud, A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit

Deciding to take conscious control of a habit that has been running you:

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Deciding whether to keep a comforting belief or face an uncomfortable truth:

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Deciding whether to come clean about something you have been hiding:

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.

Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Deciding whether to follow the group or trust your own judgment:

The greater the number of the participants in the crowd, the lower the level to which mental performances sink.

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego