[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.

The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.

We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.

Opposition is not necessarily enmity.

When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.