the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

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.

To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

...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¢.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.