Sigmund Freud was a prolific writer and many of his quotations have become quite famous. One of his best known sayings ("Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar") might never have been spoken by him at all.
This quote is often attributed to the famous psychoanalyst despite the fact that there is no evidence that he ever actually said these words. How exactly did the quote come to be? Freud was a heavy smoker for most of his life. According to his biographer Ernst Jones, he smoked as many as 20 cigars a day at one point.
As the popular story goes, someone once asked Freud about the symbolic meaning of the cigars he so often smoked, perhaps implying that Freud himself had an oral fixation. Freud supposedly responded with the now famous quote, suggesting that not everything in life holds a hidden, symbolic meaning. However, there is no evidence that this exchange ever actually occurred. Instead, most experts now believe that the quote was created by a journalist and then later mistakenly identified as a quote by Freud.
For a collection of quotes directly from Freud's writings, see these selected Sigmund Freud quotes. Do you have a favorite Freud quote?
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