“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.

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.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

The ego is not master in its own house.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

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.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

How much I desire! Inside my little satchel, the moon, and flowers.

Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.

Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?

Mastery is not a question of genetics of luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desires that stirs you from within.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?

She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.