Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

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

There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

The ego is not master in its own house.

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.