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"We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself."
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"Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ['Not without the past']"

"Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew."

"And is usually true of a man of one idea, [Charles] became obsessed."

"The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to-instead of them-change reality."

"There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored."

"I am a mask, concealing the real."

"To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic."

"The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from."

"Happiness is something that you establish before a relationship. It is not the relationship that establishes it first."

"Comparison more than reality makes men happy or wretched."
Explore more quotes by Sigmund Freud


"Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any."


"It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement."


"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."


"A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."


"Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."


"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."


"It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being."


"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."
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