“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”

“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”

“Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.”

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

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

“Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.”

“The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”