773 Quotes by Sigmund Freud

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

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.

Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates.

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.