You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

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.

A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.