Quotes from The Interpretation of Dreams
10 notable lines from Sigmund Freud · 1900
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Quotations follow the Joyce Crick translation (Oxford World's Classics, 1999) — our recommended edition.
A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.
Chapter III The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.
Ch. IV, Distortion in Dreams · trans. Strachey When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.
Ch. II, The Method of Interpreting Dreams · trans. Strachey Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
Virgil, *Aeneid* VII.312, the book's epigraph It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were.
On Oedipus Rex, Ch. V · trans. Brill His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him.
On Oedipus Rex, Ch. V · trans. Brill There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.
On the limits of interpretation, Ch. VII · trans. Strachey The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming of that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Freud recalling Plato, Ch. VII · trans. Brill Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Footnote added to the 1909 edition · trans. Strachey