The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?