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

If youth knew; if age could.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.

Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

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.

We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.