I would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a... as something one falls in.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.

Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.

The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.

. . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.