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

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.