Sigmund Freud Quotes on Life
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. This page collects quotes attributed to Sigmund Freud on the topic of life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
Ch. 2; as translated by James Strachey , p.63 -
“Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
Ch. 10 -
Attributed to Sigmund Freud:
“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”
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“Princess, my little Princess, Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today.”
Letter to Martha Bernays, after receiving a travel grant he had been having dreams of receiving (20 June 1885). The final line is the German equivalent of "and they lived happily ever after," as a conventional ending for fairy tales. -
“A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller 's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.”
Ein Mensch wie ich kann ohne Steckenpferd, ohne herrschende Leidenschaften, ohne einen Tyrannen in Schillers Worten, nicht leben. Ich habe meinen Tyrannen gefunden und in seinem Dienst kenne ich kein Maß. | Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (1895), as quoted in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol 3-4 (1967) p. 159