Sigmund Freud Quotes

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.

Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.

In short, humans are programmed to get bored.

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

Man is not constituted to take pleasure in the same things always.

Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.

How delicious is pleasure after torment!

I don't quite jump for joy, but I am awfully glad to see him.

If anger proceeds from a great cause, it turns to fury; if from a small cause, it is peevishness; and so is always either terrible or ridiculous.

Comparison is a human thing, a normal thing.

Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.

What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.

Contrast the experience with something worse and you cannot help feeling happy and grateful because... The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does.

The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho' there can be no happiness without pleasure--yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.--We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.

It feels good. It feels real good.

You can be miserable before you have a cookie and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie but you can't be miserable while you are eating a cookie.

Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.

Wine is only sweet to happy men.

Happy! Who is happy? Was there not a serpent in Paradise itself? And if Eve had been perfectly happy beforehand, would she have listened to the tempter?