“What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering, does becomeThe opposite of itself”

“A rebel can be a miserable and contemptible man; but there is nothing contemptible in a revolt as such - and to be a rebel in view of contemporary society does not in itself lower the value of a man. There are even cases in which one might have to honour a rebel,because he finds something in our society against which war ought to be waged - he wakens us from our slumber.”

“Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.”

“Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.”

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

“The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.”