There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

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

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.