Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

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

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.

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.

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?

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