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Adventure
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"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."
-Sigmund Freud, letter, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (1985), February 1, 1900
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Censorship
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
-Sigmund Freud, Referring to the public burning of his books in Berlin. Letter to Ernest Jones (1933)
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Decisions
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"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature."
-Sigmund Freud
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Insults
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The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
-Sigmund Freud
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Mankind, Man
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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
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Mental Illness
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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.
-Sigmund Freud
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Mind, the
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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
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Personality
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"A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world."
-Sigmund Freud
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Reality
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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.
-Sigmund Freud, New Lectures in Psychoanalysis [quoted in introduction to Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl]
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Secrets
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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; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
-Sigmund Freud, “The First Dream,” Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
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Solitude
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Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
-Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919)
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Books by and about Sigmund Freud
