When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.

One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.