Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.