Sigmund Freud Quotes

A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness.

OCD, we discovered is a lot of different things-it's not just washing your hands, it's whatever you're obsessed with. It can be just the way you hold a pen, and you always have to have it a certain way or you have to eat your food, it depends. It's something that, as a character I thought was really interesting because sometimes it's used in a film where it is OCD and sometimes it's strategic.

When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

I'm not a doctor, but I would assume that anything that you're doing that's harming you, and you can't stop doing it, is a sign of mental illness.

OCD is a really serious condition - it's a proper thing. It's not just, 'Oh, you like your pens to be straight'. For me, it would always go in tandem with being unhappy. The unhappier I was, the worse it got.

I just had a thought that perhaps religion is so vibrant here is because of the melting pot aspect to our society. WE have so many cultures here in the US and they all bring something new to their religious experiences.

When people say, 'Religion is all right for some, but I am not religious, and it means nothing to me,' is it because they have not experienced the uplift that comes from sacrificing for and serving their fellowmen?

Many a man is mad in certain instances, and goes through life without having it perceived. For example, a madness has seized a person of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime ever to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved.

I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

It's very difficult to live with religious ideas. I can't compare religion to the movies. I can fuse them.

As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

I tell my mother I went to God in spite of my religious education. I feel that my religious education was inadequate, but that doesn't mean that Judaism was inadequate.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness.

I believe in mystery and, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man.