Freud wrote it to C. G. Jung from Rome on 19 September 1907, in a letter pressing Jung to help found a psychoanalytic journal. The wording everyone quotes is Tania and James Stern’s English translation, printed as letter 127 in Letters of Sigmund Freud (Basic Books, 1960), pp. 257–58 — without the two commas the internet later added.
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful” Sigmund Freud, letter to C. G. Jung, Rome, 19 September 1907, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (Basic Books, 1960), 257–58.
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Provenance
The letter
Source
Letters of Sigmund Freud
Letter
No. 127, to C. G. Jung — Rome, 19 September 1907
Translation
Tania & James Stern; edited by Ernst L. Freud (Basic Books, New York, 1960), pp. 257–58
Original
Written in German; the volume is catalogued as a translation of Briefe, 1873–1939
Now for my ceterum censeo: Let us found our journal. People will grumble, buy and read it. One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. But please don’t make so much of me. I am too human for that role.
letter 127, pp. 257–58
The edition footnotes “our journal” as the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse — though that journal was not founded until 1913; the periodical this 1907 push actually produced was the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (1909), with Jung as editor. Freud signs off from the Hotel Milano in Rome, where he says he is “quite alone.”
Quote Investigator ↗ credits the statement to Freud, dates it to a 1907 letter to C. G. Jung, and identifies the English rendering as Tania and James Stern’s, citing letter 127 on pp. 257–258 of the 1960 Basic Books volume.
We then read the book itself. The full-text scan on the Internet Archive ↗ — an unofficial 2025 upload of the 1975 Basic Books printing, page-identical to the 1960 edition Quote Investigator cites — carries the sentence exactly as quoted, in letter 127 headed “To C. G. Jung / Rome / September 19, 1907,” which opens on p. 257 and carries the sentence on p. 258.
The same volume supplies the setting: in a letter of 2 September 1907 Freud writes to Jung “in Amsterdam, shortly before or just after your inflammable lecture, busily defending psychoanalysis,” while Freud himself stayed away — the congress is footnoted elsewhere in the volume (letter 125, n. 9) as the International Congress for Psychiatry and Neurology, Amsterdam, 1907 ↗.
Wikiquote’s Freud page ↗ does not carry this line in any section — its dated quotations, its “Attributed from posthumous publications” list, or its Misattributed list — which is a fair measure of how uncited its online circulation has been.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What people get wrong
The author is right. What travels wrong is the source, the punctuation and the point — the line is almost always reposted with no citation at all, as if it were a free-floating Freud aphorism rather than a sentence from one working letter.
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SourceQuote aggregators and social posts No source given
Goodreads ↗ carries the quote under Freud’s name with no work, no date and no letter cited — and adds that its quotes are community-added and unverified. That citation vacuum is what lets the line drift.
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WordingThe comma-ed version Repunctuated
The printed translation reads “One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful” — no commas — in the Basic Books text (1975 printing of the 1960 translation) ↗. Every word of the popular version matches; only the two commas around “in retrospect” were added later.
Repackaged as a maxim about grinding, it loses what Freud was actually doing: arguing for founding a journal after a hostile congress, and in the very next breath asking Jung not to idolise him — “I am too human for that role,” in the same paragraph ↗.
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Voice“Freud said” Translator uncredited
Freud wrote in German. The English cadence people quote belongs to Tania and James Stern, credited on the volume’s title page — “selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud; translated by Tania & James Stern,” as the Open Library edition record ↗ transcribes it; no version of this English sentence existed in Freud’s lifetime.
✓Verdict: genuine. Freud wrote it to C. G. Jung from Rome on 19 September 1907, and it was first published in English in 1960 — a finding traced in detail by Quote Investigator ↗ and confirmed here against the printed text.
Context
A pep talk, not a poster
Early September 1907 was a bruising month for psychoanalysis. Jung had gone to the International Congress for Psychiatry and Neurology in Amsterdam to defend it in public; Freud, by his own admission, stayed away, hunting mushrooms and swimming in a Carinthian lake, and called it “almost an act of cowardice.” By the 19th he was alone in Rome at the Hotel Milano, answering Jung’s report of how the congress had gone.
His reply is not consolation but strategy. Freud tells Jung their opponents are sterile and can only repeat themselves, then reaches for his standing refrain — ceterum censeo, “besides which, I hold” — and says: found the journal. The famous sentence lands right there, as the reason to keep going. And Freud immediately undercuts any hero-worship it might invite: he asks Jung not to make so much of him, because he is “too human for that role.”
It was never a maxim about hustle. It was one embattled man telling a younger colleague to hold the line and start the journal.
Two details the poster version drops
“Our journal” had a name — but not that one. The Basic Books edition footnotes Freud’s phrase with the title Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, which is an anachronism: that journal was not founded until 1913. The periodical this 1907 push actually produced was the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen — agreed at the Salzburg congress in 1908, launched by Deuticke in 1909 with Jung as editor. Either way, the “years of struggle” Freud is forecasting are years of running a professional periodical against organised hostility, not a generic season of hardship.
The English is a translation, and a good one. Freud wrote in German; the volume’s own Library of Congress cataloguing data, printed in the front matter of the full-text scan ↗, records it as a translation of Briefe, 1873–1939. The cadence people quote — “will strike you as the most beautiful” — belongs to Tania and James Stern ↗, credited on the title page as the translators of the Basic Books edition.
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1856–1939 · Austrian neurologist & founder of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was the Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, in private practice in Vienna from 1886, and at Berggasse 19 from 1891 until he fled to London in 1938. He was also a prodigious correspondent — his son Ernst went through some 4,000 surviving letters to assemble the 1960 selection in which this sentence appears. In 1907, when he wrote it, psychoanalysis was barely a decade old, publicly ridiculed, and its most promising ally was a young Zurich psychiatrist named C. G. Jung.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Sigmund Freud to C. G. Jung, Rome, 19 September 1907, letter 127, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud, translated by Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 257–58.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/one-day-in-retrospect-the-years-of-struggle-will-strike-you/