773 Quotes by Sigmund Freud

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

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

Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.

These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.

All that matters is love and work.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.