Sigmund Freud Quotes

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and it is true as well for pleasures that seem simpler and more animalistic, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust.

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

We cannot see what we don't believe.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

What I say and what I'm really experiencing - those universes are very different.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

I know all too well that people only see what they want to see and remember only what they want to remember.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

When we stand the truth on its head we generally fail to notice that our head is not standing where it should be standing either.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.

It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.