I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know, that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.

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

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.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

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