"Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind."
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Quote collection
Sigmund Freud quotes (page 20 of 24)
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?"
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"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go."
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"At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."
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"But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id."
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"America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless."
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"The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore."
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"There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one."
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"The communal life of human beings had . . . a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love."
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"This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects."
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"Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us O'er the world's tempestuous sea; Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, For we have no help but Thee."
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"Christmas is the alcoholidays"
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"In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world."
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"Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know."
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"If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgements, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility."
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"The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling."
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"all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states."
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"To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish."
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"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
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"In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself."
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