If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talks to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity that nothing is.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. And why old persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.

Psychotherapy is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

There are two kinds of disabled persons: Those who dwell on what they have lost and those who concentrate on what they have left.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem.

Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don’t work here on Earth.

What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf.