By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.