I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.

Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.

There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.