EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.