Sigmund Freud Quotes

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature - and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

Unteachable from infancy to tomb — There is the first & main characteristic of mankind.

Each of has a natural instinct to rise like a flame. Lets nurture that instinct

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts.

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

There is implanted in every man, naturally, a strong desire for progress.

I think it's one of the most natural things for any human to do is to be able to run because it's that flight or fight reaction you have. You either fight or you run away. It's just a natural way for us to move.

That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

Of all human foibles love of living is the most powerful.

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.

Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.