The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.