Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.