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"Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us."
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"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."

"By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally."

"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"

"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."
Explore more quotes by Sigmund Freud


"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."


"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."


"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."


"Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. 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 to us than any other."


"We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself."


"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations."


"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."
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