The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself-and pays his psychoanalyst.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?

To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured.

The unexamined life is not worth living.