In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.

A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.

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

[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.