Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
Christmas is the alcoholidays.
The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.
One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of ‘happiness’: one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.
Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.
An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.
In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.