“Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense.”

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

The unconscious mind is that strange sub-world revealed through dreams, lapses, or Freudian slips. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

No responsibility of government is more fundamental than the responsibility of maintaining the highest standard of ethical behavior for those who conduct the public business.

People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do. Behavior never lies.

The best way to behave is to misbehave.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

Well behaved women do not make history.