When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem

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

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

Love is the problem of an animal.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

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?