A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.