When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.
My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don’t know whether I find it any the quicker.
There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man’s aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.
The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.
Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
Let us consider the polarity of love and hate... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.
Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is ‘exogamy’, an institution related to totemism.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
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.