The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on.... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!

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.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

We must love or we grow ill.

The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.