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"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."
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"Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind."

"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."

"I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"Nothing will ever be solved if we wallow in the darkness of denial."

"When the river of emotions bursts its banks and expectations go over the edges of reality, the brain creates hallucinations. Ringxiety-stricken people feel illusive vibrating alerts and hear phantom phone rings, since absence of ringing generates scaring emptiness and destroys their self-esteem. ['Kein Schwein ruft mich an']"

"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."

"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."

"People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear."

"If you think a lot of the comments made tonight are not funny but are immature and tasteless that's only because the sense of humor is the first thing to go."
Explore more quotes by Sigmund Freud


"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."


"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."


"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."


"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."


"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."


"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."
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