Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.

The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.