Sigmund Freud Quotes About Pleasure

Quotes about: Pleasure

• Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

  Sigmund Freud

  Pain, Reality, Investing

  Sigmund Freud (2014). “Reflections on War and Death”, p.10, The Floating Press

• The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Ego, Suffering

• There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Play, Giving

  Sigmund Freud (1962). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

• I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

  Sigmund Freud

  Hard Work, Play, Ideas

  Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister (1963). “Psycho-analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister”

• We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

  Sigmund Freud

  Littles, Gains, Intense

• One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Giving Up, Pleasure, Uncertain

• The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Ego, Enemy, Savages

• Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

  Sigmund Freud

  Pain, Reality, Illusion

  Sigmund Freud (2014). “Reflections on War and Death”, p.10, The Floating Press

• The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

  Sigmund Freud

  Giving Up, Mean, Goal

  Sigmund Freud (1930). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, p.16, Courier Dover Publications

• What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

  Sigmund Freud

  Doubt, Principles, Purpose

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

• It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Men, Thinking

• In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Believe, Taken, Principles

  Sigmund Freud (1955). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

• Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.

  Sigmund Freud

  Happiness, Mean, Pleasure

• The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

  Sigmund Freud

  Believe, Expression, Principles

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.2, Courier Corporation

• It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.

  Sigmund Freud

  Majority, Principles, Dominance

  Sigmund Freud (2014). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.3, Courier Corporation

• The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Long, Ego

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.4, Courier Corporation

• There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

  Sigmund Freud

  Ego, Doubt, Principles

  Sigmund Freud (2014). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.14, Courier Corporation

• The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.

  Sigmund Freud

  Games, Movement, Pleasure

• I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.

  Sigmund Freud

  Men, Smell, Doe

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