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.

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

We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

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

Horror alone brings peace of mind.

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.