...Of course it had, they all had, a significance of some sort, but what was it? It was as though they performed a ritual dance, elaborate and ancient, and you knew that those complicated measures had a meaning which it was important for you to know; and yet you could see no clue, no clue...

-The Painted Veil, SOMERSET MAUGHAM

...But the common character of the mildest as well as the severest cases, to which the faulty and chance actions contribute, lies in the ability to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself...

-Psychopathology of Everyday Life, SIGMUND FREUD

..."Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as a Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best: whencesoe'er I came; whereso'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."...

-Moby Dick, HERMAN MELVILLE

...Has it not been written that the sun beguiles our attention from things of intellect to fix it on things of the sense? The sun, they say, dazzles; so bewitching reason and memory that the soul for very pleasure forgets its actual state, to cling with doting on the loveliest of all the objects she shines on. Yes, and then it is only through the medium of some corporeal being that it can raise itself again to contemplation of higher things. Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing...

-Death in Venice, THOMAS MANN

...The Kantian scholar Hans Vaihinger in his "The Philosophy of As-If" gives an eccentric but interesting account of Kant's theory about the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason... ('heurisitc fictions') ...necessary as they are, they must not be regarded as informing us of the world as it is, but must be accepted as fictional aids both to theoretical enquiry and to rational living. Thus morality requires us to act -as if- the will were free, even though we cannot know that it is and have scientific reasons for supposing that it is not...

-Kant's Moral Philosophy, HB ACTON

...In order that feelings, representations, ideas and the like should attain a certain degree of memorability, it is important that they should not remain isolated, but that they should enter into connections and associations of an appropriate nature...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...My mode of procedure is, of course, less easy than that of the popular cipher method, which translates the given dream-content by reference to an established key; I, on the contrary, hold that the same dream- content may conceal a different meaning in the case of different persons, or in different connections...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...Identification is a highly important motive in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled to express in their symptoms not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of quite a number of other persons; they can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama with their own personalities...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...The obsessional neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-morality, which develops as a strong reinforcement against the primary character that is threatening to revive...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...Before the art of painting arrived at an understanding of the laws of expression by which it is bound, it attempted to make up for this deficiency. In old paintings little labels hung out of the mouths of the persons represented, giving in writing the speech which the artist despaired of expressing in the picture...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...In the first place, the dream renders an account of the connection which is undeniably present between all the portions of the dream- thoughts by combining this material into a unity as a situation or a proceeding. It reproduces logical connections in the form of simultaneity; in this case it behaves rather like the painter who groups together all the philosophers or poets in a picture of the School of Athens, or Parnassus. They never were assembled in any hall or on any mountain-top, although to the reflective mind they do constitute a community...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...The free play of ideas following any chain of associations may perhaps occur in cases of destructive organic affections of the brain. What, however, is taken to be such in the psychoneuroses may always be explained as the influence of the censorship on a series of thoughts which have been pushed into the foreground by the concealed directing ideas...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...We begin to suspect that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that in a dream "there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a direct path," and we are encouraged to expect, from the analysis of dreams, a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of psychical things in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and neuroses have preserved for us more of the psychical antiquities than we suspected; so that psycho- analysis may claim a high rank among those sciences which endeavour to reconstruct the oldest and darkest phases of the beginnings of mankind...

-The Interpretation of Dreams, SIGMUND FREUD

...And in Zagreus' very immobility confronting death, he encountered the secret image of his own life. Fever helped him here, and with it an exultant certainty of sustaining consciousness to the end, of dying with his eyes open. Zagreus too had had his eyes open that day, and tears had fallen from them. But that was the last weakness of a man who had not had his share of life. Patrice was not afraid of such weakness. In the pounding of his feverish blood, though it failed to reach the limits of his body, he understood that such weakness would not be his. For he had played his part, fashioned his role, perfected man's one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long, no doubt. He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself - what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed...

-A Happy Death, ALBERT CAMUS