Sigmund Freud Quotes

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

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.

The interpretation of dreams is a great art.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

The mind is always present. You just don't see it.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

Some day... some day, I want to go much deeper into the human mind.

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

I don't think there is any kind of magic about what I do. All of the connections are there, somewhere in the subconscious or in the collective unconscious. If I let the elements speak to each other, then these coincidences will happen. And they do happen. They happen all the time.

In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

Subconscious is motivated by emotion, right? Not reason.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path.

After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.

The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.