Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.

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

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 psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.

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

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.