...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¢.

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.

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.

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.

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

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.