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.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

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

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

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

The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this,makes man seem important,vital to the universe. immortal in some ways

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.