To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.

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?

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]

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.