Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.