To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.

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

My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.

Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.

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.

It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.