The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.

We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.