We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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