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Quotes

Sigmund Freud


(1856 - 1939)

physician and pioneer psychoanalyst,
Austria


Quotations of Sigmund Freud

"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego, 1921)

"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / The Future of an Illusion / 1927)

"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / The Future of an Illusion / 1927)

"The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / The Future of an Illusion / 1927)

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / The Future of an Illusion / 1927)

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / The Future of an Illusion / 1927)

"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Civilization and its Discontents / 1931)

"The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Civilization and its Discontents / 1931)

"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."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / Moses and Monotheism / 1939)

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939 / New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)

"When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939)

"In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939)

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939)

"Religion originate in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise."
(Sigmund Freud / 1856-1939)


Biography of Sigmund Freud



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