Sigmund Freud Quotes

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.

This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

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

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

There's no point in living in an alternate reality.

It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

I don't think people should confuse fantasy and reality because no one is perfect - we all know that.

People do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy.

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

It's the human condition. We gravitate to what's easy, things that are comfortable, convenient, pain-free, self-serving.

Honestly, I was a little bit arrogant because I came in and thought it was going to be easy and that I'd be on television in a year, no problem. Then you realize how many different things it takes to become a successful superstar, and it really is a rude awakening.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

I think there are always times when people want to get out of reality, because sometimes it sucks and it's difficult.

She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality.

Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.