We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.