Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

The sensibility claimed by neurotics is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made man feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and overcivilized?

If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.

We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are!

The mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy engrossed with oneself, ungrateful and malignant, and never quite in touch with reality.

What a curious creature is man! With what a variety of powers and faculties is he endued! Yet how easily is he disturbed and put out of order!