We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.