What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

The communal life of human beings had . . . a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?