What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.

There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.