If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

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.

Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

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.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.