My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.

What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.