The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

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.