Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.

A strong egoism is a protection.

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.