"Thus, left to itself, the infusorium dies a natural death from the imperfect disposal of its own metabolic products: perhaps all higher animals die ultimately from the same inability."

"The germ cells themselves would behave in a completely ‘narcissistic’ fashion, as we are accustomed to describe it in the theory of the neuroses when an individual concentrates his libido on the ego, and gives out none of it for the charging of objects. The germ cells need their libido—the activity of their vital instincts—for themselves as a provision for their later enormous constructive activity. Perhaps the cells of the malignant growths that destroy the organism can also be considered to be narcissistic in the same sense. Pathology is indeed prepared to regard the kernels of them as congenital in origin and to ascribe embryonal attributes to them. Thus the Libido of our sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of poets and philosophers, which holds together all things living."

"In the course of more deliberate advance it came under psycho-analytic observation how regularly libido is withdrawn from the object and directed towards the ego (introversion), and through the study of the libido-development of the child in its earliest phases it became clear that the ego is the true and original reservoir of the libido, which is extended to the object only from this. The ego took its place as one of the sexual objects and was immediately recognised as the choicest among them. Where the libido thus remained attached to the ego it was termed ‘narcissistic’. This narcissistic libido was naturally also the expression of the energy of sexual instincts in the analytical sense which now had to be identified with the ‘instincts of self-preservation’, the existence of which was admitted from the first."

"Clinical observations forced upon us the view that the part-instinct of masochism, the one complementary to sadism, is to be understood as a recoil of the sadism on to the ego itself. A turning of the instinct from the object to the ego is, however, essentially the same as a turning from the ego to the object, which is just now the new idea in question. Masochism, the turning of the instinct against the self, would then be in reality a return to an earlier phase of this, a regression. The exposition I then gave of masochism needs correction in one respect as being too exclusive: masochism may also be what I was there concerned to deny, primary."

"Where there are such good grounds for distrust, only a tepid feeling of indulgence is possible towards the results of one’s own mental labours."

"Whither we cannot fly, we must go limping
The Scripture saith that limping is no sin."

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle