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.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.

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

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.