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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
-Sigmund Freud, letter, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (1985), February 1, 1900
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America
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America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
-Sigmund Freud
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America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
-Sigmund Freud
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Anger
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The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
-Sigmund Freud
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Authors & Writing
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Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
-Sigmund Freud
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Baby, Babies
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No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
-Sigmund Freud
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Belief
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Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
-Sigmund Freud
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Birth
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The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
-Sigmund Freud
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It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
-Sigmund Freud
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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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Children
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We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.
-Sigmund Freud
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
-Sigmund Freud
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Civilization
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Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
-Sigmund Freud
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Communism
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I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
-Sigmund Freud
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Conscience
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-Sigmund Freud
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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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Discovery
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Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
-Sigmund Freud
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Dissent
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
-Sigmund Freud
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Doctors
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The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
-Sigmund Freud
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Drugs
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Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
-Sigmund Freud
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Family
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If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
-Sigmund Freud
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Fate & Destiny
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Anatomy is destiny.
-Sigmund Freud
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Father
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I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
-Sigmund Freud
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Flowers
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Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
-Sigmund Freud
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God
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The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
-Sigmund Freud
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Happiness
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One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation.
-Sigmund Freud
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Honesty
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Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
-Sigmund Freud
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Humanity
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Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
-Sigmund Freud
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Illusion
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The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.
-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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Liberty
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The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
-Sigmund Freud
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Love
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We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
-Sigmund Freud
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One is very crazy when in love.
-Sigmund Freud
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Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
-Sigmund Freud
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Majority
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Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
-Sigmund Freud
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Mankind, Man
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The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris.
-Sigmund Freud
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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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Maturity
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Where id was, there shall ego be.
-Sigmund Freud
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Mental Illness
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A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
-Sigmund Freud
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Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
-Sigmund Freud
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We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
-Sigmund Freud
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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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The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
-Sigmund Freud
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The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
-Sigmund Freud
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Miracles
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I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
-Sigmund Freud
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Morals
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Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
-Sigmund Freud
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Ordinary
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Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
-Sigmund Freud
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People
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The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
-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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Pleasure
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The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us -- of becoming happy -- is not attainable: yet we may not -- nay, cannot -- give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
-Sigmund Freud
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Property
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By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.
-Sigmund Freud
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Psychiatry
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It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
-Sigmund Freud
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The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage -- in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.
-Sigmund Freud
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Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
-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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Religion
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Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
-Sigmund Freud
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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
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Self Respect
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A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
-Sigmund Freud
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Sex
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We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
-Sigmund Freud
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Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it.
-Sigmund Freud
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Society
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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 the manifestations of their aggression.
-Sigmund Freud
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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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Suffering
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We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.
-Sigmund Freud
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Thought
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The ego is not master in its own house.
-Sigmund Freud
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Truth
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From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.
-Sigmund Freud
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Wisdom
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Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
-Sigmund Freud
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Women
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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
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Books by and about Sigmund Freud
